‘Grab a Phaser, Ambassador’: Diplomacy

in Star Trek
Iver B. Neumann

The perfect Star Trek script begins with a great science fiction concept that
allows you to tell an exciting adventure, while at the same time serving as a
metaphor for contemporary humanity.1

Introduction: Representations of Diplomacy

In the fourth Star Trek show, the starship Voyager finds itself stranded in an
uncharted quadrant of the galaxy. The pilot details how they make new friends and
new enemies immediately upon arrival. In a later episode, Captain Kathryn
Janeway has an intimate conversation with one of these new friends, the Talaxian
Neelix. The conversation ends with her making him the ship’s ambassador to the
worlds that they are about to meet on their journey home to Earth. Immediately
afterwards, they are hit by gunfire, and Janeway instructs Neelix with the curt
command: ‘Grab a phaser, ambassador’. There is a time for diplomacy, and a time
for war.
Following some preliminary remarks about the place of second-order
phenomena in the study of International Relations (IR), this article discusses the
relationship between representation of Star Trek diplomacy, on the one hand, and
American diplomacy, on the other. If the world does not present itself to us
directly, but can only be grasped through its re-presentations, then they are
constitutive of our social worlds. And if the work of social scientists is to
investigate social worlds so that we can understand them better, then the starting
point must be those re-presentations, which are constitutive of the social. A crucial
question becomes which re-presentations to investigate. The division of labour
inside the social sciences has established a situation where lines of inquiry have
formed as a result of habit. Political scientists look at re-presentations of
bargaining partners, anthropologists look at re-presentations of everyday life,

A previous version of this article was read at the annual ISA conference, Chicago, 20-24 February 2001.
I thank Halvard Leira, Dan Nexon, Patrick T. Jackson, Roberta E. Pearson, Cindy Weber, Jutta Weldes
and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
1. Brannon Braga quoted in Jeff Greenwald, ‘Write for Star Trek’, Wired Archive 1996 [www.
wired.com/wired/ archive/4.01/ trek.script] (1 December 2001).

© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2001. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 603-624

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geographers look at re-presentations of space, etc. A common premise for these

inquiries seems to be that, as representations of the physical world, they are ipso
facto legitimate objects of social inquiry, or first-order representations. However, if
social worlds are made up of re-presentations, there is no inherent reason why first
order ones should be more constitutive than others.2 Indeed, to a number of the
people who actually inhabit and make up those worlds, the distinction would not
make any sense in the first place.
In the philosophy of the social sciences, a famous debate turned on exactly this
issue. The topic happened to be witchcraft, and the empirical issue (or, for some of
the participants, the lack thereof) was whether witches existed or not. Being an
epistemological debate rather than an ontological one, the key question was how to
study societies where representations of witches and their purported actions played
a key role in constituting the social matrix. Peter Winch, who opened the debate,
held that the way to go about it was to defer the ontological question of whether
witches existed or not as external to the case at hand, which was to understand the
social.3 If representations of witches played a key role in constituting social life,
then those representations should be among the starting points of any social inquiry
into this particular social world. Furthermore, the fact that the entities in question
happen to be the objects of religious fervour is no coincidence. The study of
religion has historically been considered to be scientific, and it is definitely also a
study of second-order phenomena. Here is a historical precedence, which lends
some legitimacy to the study of other second-order phenomena which define social
worlds as well.
It seems to me that this insight transcends its subject matter. It has a bearing on
our study of all social worlds. In the social settings where most International
Relationists work, witches are not amongst the key topics. There does, however,
exist a set of second-order phenomena, the consumption and discussion of which
takes up an enormous amount of time and energy. These phenomena are reality-
constituting, they are part of what Michel Foucault refers to as the archive, that is,
the forms, mnemonics and techniques which make saying, writing and storing stuff
possible. Indeed, the forms mentioned by Foucault by way of example are ritual
recital, pedagogics, festivals, public performance and ‘entertainment’.4 Not least
due to the force lent to it by the amount of time, money and other resources which
audiences bring to their consumption, this is a part of the archive, which is relevant
to how the world we study as IR specialists is re-produced, but it is also one which
has been rarely scrutinised. Neither does there exist an obvious extant literature to

2. One indication of an ensuing change is a newly published geopolitical reader, which includes a
study of second-order representations, see Andrew Kirby, ‘The Construction of Geopolitical Images:
The World According to Biggles (and Other Fictional Characters)’, in Geopolitical Traditions: A
Century of Geopolitical Thought, eds. Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (London: Routledge, 2000).
3. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routlegdge,
1990).
4. Michel Foucault, ‘Réponse à une question’, in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. I, 1954-1969 (Paris:
Gallimard, [1968] 1994), 682-83.

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turn to outside of IR. ‘Entertainment’ is part of the realm of what non-

anthropologists refer to as ‘culture’. Over the last fifteen years or so, culture
returned to IR as a key concern. However, most of the resulting studies maintain
the prejudice of investigating culture as it pertains to representations of first-order
phenomena. The most notable exception is the work of Michael Shapiro. He makes
a point similar to the one I am trying to make here in the context of which textual
genres we are supposed to study:

Part of what must be rejected is that aspect of the terrain predicated on a

radical distinction between what is thought of as fictional and scientific genres
of writing. In the history of thought the distinction has been supported by the
notion that the fictional text, e.g., the story, play, or novel, manufactures its
own objects and events in acts of imagination, while the epistemologically
respectable genres, such as the scientific text, have ‘real’ objects and events
which provide a warrant for the knowledge-value of those of the text’s
statements purporting to be about the objects and events.5

Among the ‘fictional and scientific genres of writing’, the most popular are, by
definition, those which are classified as popular culture, and amongst these
‘science fiction’ holds a central place. Within this genre, for example, we find the
largest cash cow of American network TV, Star Trek. Inasmuch as earnings come
from commercials and their price of commercials is determined by viewer ratings,
Star Trek is probably the most widely watched programme on American television.
In as much as American television sets the global standard for what ‘good
television’ is and indeed exports programmes all over the world, these
representations play a role in constituting countless social worlds.6 When one adds
that the interaction between different words is one of the key subjects of the
original series and its three subsequent sister series, as well as of the ten feature
films, animated series, novels, merchandise etc. etc., it is small wonder that Star

5. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography,

and Policy Analysis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 7.
6. Surprisingly, this obvious point seems to be lost on a number of film students. One example, which
is particularly striking reads as follows: ‘[r]ecently, a Norwegian exchange student attempted to explain
to me her bewilderment regarding Star Trek: The Next Generation’s popularity in theUS. Norwegians,
she claimed, generally find the television series ‘stupid’. Although she struggled to articulate exactly
why she reached this conclusion, one argument she was able to express concerned the entire science
fiction motif of TNG: ‘starships’ exploring the universe and technology eliminating basic human needs
are conceptually as alien to her rural, pastoral native culture as a Cardassian might be to an Earth-bound
human’. Steven F. Collins, ‘Trilateralism and Hegemony in Star Trek: The Next Generation’, in
Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, eds. Taylor Harrison, Sarah Pojansky, Kent A. Ono
and Elyce Rae Helford (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 137. In order to reach more awareness of the
role played by one’s own unproblematised hegemonic gaze in framing one’s research, a bit of Earth
travel and familiarisation with Galton’s problem would perhaps be called for.

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Trek has been the topic of one of the few IR investigations of popular culture.7 It
will also be the topic of this one.
I made the point that extant studies of cultural artefacts often focus on the
representations themselves, rather than on their role in constituting the social. We
need some notion of how this can be done. In many social scientific studies, an
event or ‘outcome’ focuses the analysis, so that what is studied may be broken
down neatly into causes and effects, dependent and independent variables and the
like. A somewhat less strict way of setting up the analysis is to treat the object of
study as a discourse. If the object of study is a discourse, it is not obvious that there
would be any events or even effects which offer themselves readily to be studied.
One of the reasons why extant studies of popular culture tend to lack a precise
focus, is simply that there is no obvious site to study.
Traditionally, investigations of popular culture tend to have three different focal
points: production, content and reception. Ideally, all three should be covered in
any one analysis. In this paper, the focus will be on how one precondition of
reception, namely the history of diplomacy, relates to content, namely the
representations of diplomacy in Star Trek. In order to bolster the claims about the
importance of what we may call this process of social circulation, I want to make
an initial point about production. Star Trek shows fit the standard format of
American television inasmuch as their cost was $1 million ten years ago and has
risen so much since then that the number of episodes per season has come under
significant pressure. Each episode has the standard length of around three quarters
of an hour, leaving around a quarter for the commercials, which are supposed to
pay for production and add a profit. Advertisers are particularly interested in
viewers between the age of 17 and 33, the general idea being that this is the period
when you have money to burn but remain immune to the fixation of spending
habits, which comes with family life.8 The episodes themselves have a standard
format. The first part of the show is a ‘hook’, that is, an in medias res, which is
supposed to come hot on the heels of the previous programme and so keep viewers
from zapping. With one break for credits and three breaks for commercials, this
means that every episode has a five-part structure. In this regard, the show is no
different from other shows, or from Western tradition’s standard dramatic format
for that matter.
The point of major interest concerns the ordering of the writing process. In 1989,
‘the producers decided to make Star Trek the only show on network television
willing to consider unsolicited, or ‘spec’, scripts [spec is short for speculation].

7. Jutta Weldes, ‘Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action, and Popular Culture’, Millennium: Journal
of International Studies 28, no. 1 (1999): 117-34.
8. From the network’s point of view, there is a trade-off between pacing of ads on the one hand, and
viewer fascination on the other. The more interested the viewer, the more ads she is expected to
stomack. When ABC initially aired Murder One, ABC was convinced that viewer fascination would
warrant ads every seven minutes. This turned out to be too much for the 17-33 age bracket, however.
They lost interest and signed off, ratings fell, and income from ads dwindled. I thank Patrick T. Jackson
for alerting an off-worlder to this stack of local American knowledge.

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What this means is that any of the program’s far-flung fans—from Cyndi Lauper to
the Dalai Lama—can pitch ideas to the producers and dream of seeing their names
in lights’.9 As a result of this decision, the studio receives well over 1000 spec
scripts a year. The point here is not to privilege sovereign authority, but to play up
the scope of the collaborative effort behind one of the initial parts of production,
namely writing. As a medium, TV appears at around the same time as the death of
the author:

Television at its inception acquired wholesale a series of values from radio in

which the ‘writer’ is privileged above any of the ‘technical’ tasks such as
direction and production. Yet in spite of this willingness to found its more
‘serious’ productions on the idea of authorship, this has proved a relatively
intractable task. For the average consumer such as ourselves, television is
virtually an anonymous medium. The bulk of its output—news,
documentaries, soap-operas, serials, adverts, come to without any obvious
‘organizing consciousness’.10

As all writers know, however, for the author, there is a life after death. The
sovereign author may be dead, but authors are still very much alive. An interview
with Bryan Fuller, a junior story editor, who became executive and co-producer,
demonstrates both how ‘spec’ writers are being attached to the show, and how the
writing process unfolds.11

Generally speaking, a writer will have an idea and compose a story document,
which usually takes about a week and anywhere from a few days to another
week to rewrite and do notes. From that point we sit down and break it as a
writing staff, which takes about another week. Once the story is broken and by
that I mean it’s ‘broken down’ into a five-act structure, it takes about two
weeks for the writer to go off and write the first draft. Then another week for
notes from the head writer, in this case Ken Biller. From that point we
distribute the script and have a pre-production meeting with all the department
heads. Rick Berman gives another round of notes, and depending on how
extensive they are, another week to churn out a final draft. At that point, we
have our production meeting and the show’s on the stage.12

9. Greenwald, ‘Write for Star Trek’, 1.

10. Rosalind Coward, ‘Dennis Potter and the Question of the Television Author’, in Film and Theory.
An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 10.
11. ‘Interview with Brian Fuller’, The Official Star Trek Newsletter, December 2000
[http://www.startrek.com/production/voyager7/ articles/ 120100.html] (1 December, 2001).
12. Ibid. One out of 100 pitches are successful, in the sense that the pitcher is invited to write the story
outline and is paid $6-9.000. The biweekly production meeting is called the ‘break meeting’—‘a fast-
paced brainstorming session in which the pitcher, the producers, and the writing staff assemble…with a
dry erase board. This is where the muscle work of the creative process gets done—where an episode is
jackhammered into its component parts’. Greenwald, ‘Write for Star Trek’, 6. The production meeting
includes the cast, and comes afterwards.

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When the interface between society and TV is wider than it is for a number of
other media, it is not only due to the number of viewers (a broad reception), and
the instantaneous feedback, which hails from the fact that shows with low ratings
lose advertisers and so may be taken off the air at the end of the season, but also to
the specific writing practices, which hold sway in this medium. And when the
interface between society and Star Trek is particularly broad, it is not only due to
all the re-runs, the production of best-selling novels, the franchise products or even
the existence of a heavily institutionalised fandom, holding large-scale conventions
and editing a number of fanzines, but also because of spec writing. The circulation
of ideas between producers and spectators is enhanced by this particular production
practice.
One scholar of literature in particular, Steven Greenblatt made his name during
the final decades of the last century by grappling with the circulation between text
and public through the concept of ‘social energies’.13 The focal point of his
investigations is more often than not Shakespeare. He asks what it was (and is) in
his plays which fascinated the audience; which energies circulated between the
play and the public and made the whole thing come alive. His answer is that there
are parallels between the form and subject matter of the dramas, and the form and
subject matter of political life at the time. Tensions of everyday life are played out
(he does not deny an element of mimesis and a possible effect of catharsis), and
Shakespeare makes this happen in such a way that the lines between the stage and
everyday life are blurred.
For a social scientist, the main point will be how representations offered in plays,
novels, or television series contribute to the constitution of the social. The first half
of Constance Penley’s NASA/Trek begins to take such a turn, by teasing out the
interdiscursivity between American space travel and Star Trek.14 Shapiro again
makes a similar point in terms of genre: ‘[b]ecause power often hides itself in
other, nonpoliticized discursive practices, the critique of ideology requires a non
respect for genre’.15 In practice, such critiques of ideology often settle not for a
study of circulation, but for demonstrating isomorphism; how representations
offered in a given cultural text parallel dominant or hegemonic representations in

13. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
14. ‘NASA first began its Star Trek makeover in the mid-seventies when the space agency yielded to
President Gerald Ford’s demand (prompted by a Star Trek fan letter-writing campaign) to change the
name of the first shuttle from Constitution to Enterprise. Many of the show’s cast members were there
as the Enterprise—an experimental model used only to practice takeoff and landing—was rolled out
onto the tarmac at Edwards Air Force Base to the stirring sounds of Alexander Courage’s theme from
Star Trek. After Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry dies in 1991, NASA let an unnamed shuttle
astronaut carry his ashes—classified as “personal effects 2”—into space. And NASA actually hired
Nichelle Nicols at one point in the late seventies to help recruit women and minorities into the astronaut
corps. Mae Jemison [a female astronaut] later invited Nicols to her launch and began every shift of her
shuttle mission with Lt. Uhura’s famous line, “hailing frequencies open”…One might conclude from
these examples that Star Trek is the theory, NASA the practice’. Constance Penley, NASA/Trek:
Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997), 51.
15. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 29.

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culture at large. Such analyses are, of course, called critiques, because they are
presented as potentially invariance-breaking: things could be different. Often, the
text will involve subplots, anti-rituals, mise-en-abimes, which themselves
undermine the main representations on offer (and deconstructivists specialise in
teasing them out). Even if it is a truism that things could be different, there is
considerable value in demonstrating how specific representations contribute to
maintaining worlds as they are; how things are made to stay the same when flux is
always what is to be expected. This paper will try to answer such questions in the
following way. First, in order to establish a baseline of sorts, I offer some general
remarks on American representations of diplomacy. Secondly, I discuss
representations of diplomacy in Star Trek. Thirdly, I place these representations in
relation to the representations of diplomacy, which have led historically to those
that prevail at present.

American Representations of Diplomacy

In 1779, when the war with Britain was at its peak, Benjamin Franklin sent the
following directive to the commanders of all armed ships acting by commission
from the Congress of the United States (US):

Gentlemen, a ship was fitted out from England before the commencement of
this war to make discoveries in unknown seas under the conduct of that most
celebrated Navigator and Discoverer, Captain Cook. This is an undertaking
truly laudable in itself, because the increase of geographical knowledge
facilitates the communication between distant nations and the exchange of
useful products and manufactures, extends the arts, and science of other kinds
is increased to the benefit of mankind in general. This, then, is to recommend
to you that should the said Ship fall into your hands, you would not consider
her as an enemy, not suffer any plunder to be made of the efforts contained in
her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.16

Franklin was shortly to become one of the first envoys to represent the US abroad.
His was not a smooth transition to the diplomatic culture of the day. For example,
he refused to dress the part when appearing at the Court of St. James, and only took
to wearing court uniform upon the express order of the King. Even then, it was not
a standard diplomatic uniform, but a rather dure affair of his own design.
Franklin’s gesture to Captain Cook and his opposition to diplomatic ways were
but two examples of how, seen from the US, diplomacy was a particularly
offensive old world practice. As Thomas Paine put it in 1792 (and making one of
the first recorded uses of the term ‘diplomatic’ for an envoy in doing so), American
diplomacy should be a new diplomacy. ‘The diplomatic character is of itself the
narrowest sphere of society that man can act in. It forbids intercourse by the

16. Quoted in James R. Killian, Jr., ‘Science and Foreign Policy’, in The Dimensions of Diplomacy,
ed. E.A.J. Johnson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), 63.

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reciprocity of suspicion; and a diplomatic is a sort of unconnected atom,

continually repelling and repelled. But this was not the case with Dr Franklin. He
was not the diplomatic of a Court, but of MAN’.17 Old world diplomats are the
suspicious spokesmen of specifics, whereas American diplomats speak for
mankind in general. This attitude did not wear off during American diplomacy’s
nineteenth century hibernation, but stayed with the US when they reappeared at the
world scene towards the end of the century. As summed up by an insider like
Bundy McGeorge in a 1962 lecture:

At the time of Woodrow Wilson, it was the articulate major premise of our
democracy, and the inarticulate major premise of our new diplomacy, that
people are not deeply different from one another. It followed that one could
and should think of making the world safe for democracy by ways and means
drawn directly from the American political tradition.18

Reviewing this tradition, John Ruggie makes two points which are pertinent to
the present analysis.19 First, he points out that American discourse on diplomacy is
embedded in a liberal discourse where individuals as well as states are seen as
freed from old world chains, and have to fend for themselves. This is a point of
departure, which could easily lead to seeing diplomacy as inevitable, for in an
atomised social setting, there must necessarily exist a functional need for rules that
may mediate the interaction of discrete entities. However, Ruggie’s second point
leads to another direction. Since liberal discourse also insists that any action should
be universally defendable (witness Franklin’s tip of the hat to Captain Cook), there
must exist a universal rationality guiding actions. Historically, when the US seized
the opportunity to put its stamp on diplomacy in the wake of the Second World
War, they did so exactly by insisting on its multilateral form, that is, by insisting
that this idea of universality be generic to more specific diplomatic institutions.20
In political terms, this universal rationality is tied up with the existence of a
republic that guarantees the possibility of an orderly life. In Anne Norton’s
psychoanalytically informed phrasing, ‘[t]he citizen seeks to complete himself in
politics’, but, failing to do so, he regards ‘his individuality as a shameful partiality
only partly overcome’.21 Ultimately, ‘[s]plit in the ambivalence of subject and
Sovereign, the citizen acquires not an unambiguous unity, but the capacity to

17. Thomas Paine, quoted in James Der Derian, On Diplomacy. A Genealogy of Western Estrangement
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 172.
18. Bundy McGeorge, ‘The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy’, in The
Dimensions of Diplomacy, 3.
19. John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Third Try at World Order? America and Multilateralism after the Cold War’,
Political Science Quarterly 109, no. 4 (1994): 553-70.
20. See John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution’, in Multilateralism
Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, ed. John Gerard Ruggie (New York:
Columbia University Press 1993).
21. Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1988), 34.

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govern himself’.22 The sovereign individual and the Sovereign political entity may,
thus, be presented as not only existing together, but as co-constitutive phenomena.
We may go further. If there exists a universal rationality, and if the US makes a
point of living up to it by being a republic with universal significance, then the US
is a model for the world. Indeed, it is a microcosm. But if that is the case, then
there exists no basis for diplomacy understood as a dialogue across cultural
dividing lines. Instead, prospective meetings will be imagined as making the rest of
the world conform to universal rationality; as it is incorporated in American
diplomacy (witness Franklin as the ‘diplomatic of MAN’). As Jesse Helms put it,
‘[it] is a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek the approval of an
international body…to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of
tyranny. The United Nations (UN) has no power to grant or decline legitimacy to
such actions. They are inherently legitimate’.23 One US permanent representative
to the UN once famously described it as a ‘sewer’.24
In necessarily homogenising terms, then, there seem to be two well entrenched
American representations of diplomacy. First, diplomacy is represented as an old
world practice of mutual suspicion. This type is morally abominable, because it is
read as being closely akin to or even leading to war. While playing itself out in a
‘sewer’, it also crops up repeatedly in American discourse, as when Richard Nixon
pledged that ‘[y]ou have to dissemble, you have to recognize that you can’t say
what you think about an individual because you may have to use him or need him
some time in the future’.25 Still, it is held that ambassadors should not be soldiers.
The latter element, that there is a grey zone where diplomacy involves the
extension of threats, which, if they are acted upon, may lead to war, is also
tentatively present in the definition given in the The Oxford Companion to Politics
of the World entry:

Above and before all else, diplomacy is a system of communication between

strangers. It is the formal means by which the self-identity of the sovereign
state is constituted and articulated through external relations with other states.
Like the dialogue from which it is constructed, diplomacy requires and seeks
to mediate otherness through the use of persuasion and force, promises and
threats, codes and symbols. It is also, according to American humorist Will
Rogers, ‘the art of saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock’.26

A second American representation of diplomacy, which is universalistic, is of

reaching out to the universe at large, inviting it to partake in the community of

22. Ibid.
23. Jesse Helms, ‘American Sovereignty and the UN’, The National Interest, no. 62 (2000/01): 31.
24. Jeane Kirkpatrick, quoted in Bruce Cronin, ‘The Paradox of Hegemony: America’s Ambiguous
Relationship with the United Nations’, European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 1 (2001):
115.
25. Quoted in Der Derian, On Diplomacy, 207.
26. James Der Derian, ‘Diplomacy’, in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 244.

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mankind by entering into the dialogue out of which diplomacy is eventually

constructed. One notes that both these two representations of diplomacy carry
within themselves an element of anti-diplomacy, one by seeing diplomacy as a
cloak for something else, namely dissembling; the other by seeing it as a step on
the way to sameness.

Star Trek Representations of Diplomacy

The voiceover to the 257 episodes of Star Trek and Star Trek—The Next
Generation (TNG) introduces them as ‘the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its
(ongoing) mission to seek out new life and new civilisations’. In the two other
shows, the United Federation of Planets is seeking out and is being sought out by
other worlds. One of the modes in which they interact with these other worlds is,
diplomacy. In the TNG episode ‘The Icarus Factor’, Captain Picard tells his second
in command that headquarters wants him as captain of a starship ‘not for your
military experience, but for your skill as a diplomat and an explorer’. In DS9
episode ‘Heart of Stone’, Jadzia Dax says to a young Ferengi who wants to join
starfleet, ‘Look, Nog, Starfleet is not just about diplomacy, exploration a lot of the
time is just hard work’. In Voyager episode ‘Juggernaut’, chief engineer B’Elanna
Torres refers to diplomacy as being ‘Janeway’s answer to everything’.

Qualifying for Diplomacy in Star Trek

In Star Trek, diplomacy is ruled out as a formal mode of interaction with pre-warp
civilisations, that is, worlds which are not capable of interstellar flight. This is a
logical consequence of the Prime Directive, which prohibits the representatives of
the United Federation of Planets to interfere in the ‘natural development’ of other
cultures. There is a central tension in the series between the explicit goal of seeking
out ‘new life and new civilisations’ on the one hand, and adhering to the Prime
Directive, which forbids the representatives of the Federation to interfere in the
‘natural development’ of other cultures, on the other.27 Due to flukes, accidents and
subterfuge, there are a number of occasions on which the Federation interacts with
such cultures. These occasions are all narrated in similar ways. The narration
centres on how the other world represents the Federation. Either, it is seen as
godlike, or indeed as consisting of or being led by gods. In a Star Trek setting, a
(fully fledged) god is an immortal and omnipotent being, omnipotence being taken
to mean that it can take up any viewpoint along the time/space continuum in the
universe. Alternatively, the Federation is seen as a technologically more advanced

27. ‘Behind the Prime Directive is the idea that it is possible to observe a society without actually
affecting it. Seen in this way, the Prime Directive constitutes a violation of one of the series’ favourite
scientific principles, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The Heisenberg Principle states that
observers always interfere with the things that they are observing. Even a hidden observer creates a
disturbance…If we believe Heisenberg (as the series does) we must admit that the Prime Directive is
founded on a scientific impossibility’. Thomas Richards, Star Trek in Myth and Legend (London:
Millennium, 1997), 15. See also Weldes, ‘Going Cultural’.

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world. The binary set of concepts religion/science, thus, frames the relationship. A
major narrative in Star Trek is how these two narratives vie one another. The
domination of the representations on a certain world is always chronologically
ordered, so that the religious gives way to the scientific one. A major drama of
these episodes concerns how although the Federation protests its disinterestedness
in this question (cultural relativism), at the same time, it loathes to see religion
rather than science frame the world view of other worlds.
In his definition of diplomacy given above, James Der Derian stresses how it is a
formalisation of dialogue. If diplomacy is ruled out as a formal mode of interaction
between pre-warp worlds and the Federation, then the dialogues between them
have certain regularities. Religious codes and symbols vie with scientific ones for
the framing of that dialogue in terms of their respective root metaphors. The ‘new
civilisations’ encountered are, thus, limited to warp-capable worlds. Relations with
these worlds are supposed to be initiated according to a lengthy ‘first contact’
protocol. This protocol must by necessity be binding only on the Federation side of
the encounter; since there has been no previous contact, at least of a formal kind,
nothing by way of shared protocol can by definition exist. The protocol is, thus,
diplomatic only in the sense that it defines one of the parties as being intended to
lead to the establishment of diplomatic contacts, not in the sense of their
regulation. The exploration of how first contact is necessarily a situation of
incommensurability is actually a major plot in the series. Examples include a first
season DS9 episode, Move Along Home, where the encountered world is only
interested in gaming, and the film, which is actually titled First Contact, where
Vulcans seek out Earth initiating a ‘first contact’ between the earthly and the
extraterrestrial world.28
One episode, which holds special interest in this regard, is TNG’s Darmok,
which details an encounter between the Enterprise and a ship manned by a people
calling themselves ‘the Children of Tama’. Uncharacteristically, Tamarian culture
is warp capable, but at the same time it has evolved a language, whose metaphors
are so tied up with the specific cultural myths that it is impenetrable by Captain
Picard and the Federation. Also uncharacteristically, myth is seen here as a
hampering rather than a helping factor in bringing about inter-world
communication, for ‘Star Trek sees myth as performing a vital and under-
appreciated function: as the central means of communication between races, and as
the very basis of language itself’.29 Myth is presented as a necessary but inherently
problematic starting point of communication, and ultimately as something, which
has to be overcome for diplomacy to blossom. Diplomacy begins where specific

28. The episode caption on videocassette no. 5, DS9, reads: ‘[t]he first alien race to come from the
Gamma Quadrant arrives at Deep Space Nine. Rather than open diplomatic relations, they just want to
gamble’.
29. Richards, Star Trek in Myth and Legend, 127.

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myths give way to a language, which avails itself to a grammar that the universal
translator can make sense of.30
Due to the very nature of first contacts, incommensurability between worlds
must necessarily be the major theme. Yet incommensurability cannot be absolute;
then there would be only one story to tell, namely how a party fails to make
contact. Although this failure may be narrated in a number of different ways, the
topic has definite limits in a medium where holding viewer attention is a sine qua
non. However, a major plot in Star Trek concerns how first contact is painfully
reached across a wide linguistic and cultural abyss. These plots are invariably
limited to only one episode, and they tend to concern contacts with worlds or
species which are more technologically advanced or think themselves as more
advanced than the Federation. For example, in ‘The Squire of Gothos’, the crew of
the enterprise is caught in a simulation of eighteenth century England. It expires
that the simulation is the creation of a child from a species about which we can
know no more than that it is non-corporeal and incredibly advanced
technologically. The comic climax of the episode finds the parents of the wayward
son scolding him for making life hard for lesser species and apologising for his
behaviour. No further contact ensues. In a number of episodes, technologically
advanced species perform more or less menacing and damaging tests on members
of the Federation. These episodes invariably end with the Federation officers
somehow managing to put an end to the unsound experiments they are being made
subject to. Crucially, however, the species in question neither seek nor desire
further contact (characteristically, one species, which addresses the crew of the
Enterprise as ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ also states that it does not find them
‘advanced’ enough for further contact). No further contact ensues, which means
that diplomacy is excluded as a mode of interaction.
We may now establish two thresholds beyond which diplomacy does not exist in
Star Trek. On the one hand, relations with pre-warp civilisations are proto-
diplomatic. They involve dialogue, and that dialogue is framed in religious or
scientific terms. In both cases, however, diplomatic relations are not allowed to
ensue, either because the other party’s all-pervasive religious world view precludes
it by assuming a god-like view of the Federation, or because the other party’s level
of scientific progress is seen by the Federation as too primitive for diplomatic
interaction. On the other hand, relations with technologically much more advanced
species—who exist as pure energy—is also out of the question. In this case as well,
the reason is that the gap in technological prowess is perceived as too large; but in
this case it is the other party, which finds the Federation wanting. The upshot is a
certain technological determinism where the possibility of structured dialogue and
the development of diplomacy is concerned. For there to be diplomatic relations, or
even a promise of possible diplomatic relations, worlds must fall roughly within
the same bracket of technological prowess.

30. On this general theme, see Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Bumpy Space’, in To Seek Out New Civilizations:
Science Fiction and International Relations, ed. Jutta Weldes (forthcoming).

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Liminars of Diplomacy in Star Trek

Like all categorisations, Star Trek’s technically determined framing of the

bandwidth for possible diplomatic relations leaves borderline cases, or liminars. On
the one hand, there are species framed as almost too technologically advanced for
diplomatic contact, and on the other, those who are framed as just about ready for
it. There are two species of the former type in the Star Trek universe; the founders
(in DS9), and the Borg (in TNG and Voyager). It is hardly coincidental that they
are not only liminar where the possibility of diplomacy is concerned, but that as
members of the species they also fulfil a liminar subject position in relation to the
humanoid species as such.31 In DS9, this position is taken up by the founder
security chief Odo, and in Voyager by Seven of Nine/Annika Hansen.32 The drama
of what degree of inter-species similarity it takes for two species to enter into
diplomatic contact with one another, is paralleled by the drama of what it takes to
be human(oid). Where collective identities are concerned, recognition is made a
question of developing diplomatic relations. Individual identity is framed as an
isomorphic question, where recognition concerns going through a process of
socialisation thorough enough to fit life aboard a starship.
Whereas species that are too advanced for diplomatic contact tend to be
energetic, the founders in DS9 exist primarily in a liquid state; that is, somewhere
in-between body matter and pure, ethereal soul. Whereas the claims made by
energetic lifeforms of being more advanced than humans are presented as
statements of fact, when a founder by the name of Laas claims that his species has
reached ‘the next stage’ of development relative to humans, his human
interlocutors scoff at him. Complete non-corporeality seems to be a condition for
having one’s claims of clear-cut technological superiority accepted by Federation
officers. The liminarity of the founders, then, is a dual matter. It is not only
presented as a matter of nature and substance, but also as one of culture and
history. We are explicitly informed by a leading Founder that they used to be
explorers of the universe, but that they were hounded and suppressed due to their
metamorphic nature. Their response was twofold. They retreated from exploration;
that is, they stopped searching out new worlds and new civilisations. Furthermore,
they embarked on a new career as empire builders; that is, they colonised other
worlds in order, we are told, to ‘bring order to chaos’.33

31. See Richard Hanley, Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek (London: Boxtree, 1997).
32. In the former case, humanity is limned off from pure organic matter (nature); in the latter, from
technology (culture). According to episode writers, the reanthropomorphisation of Seven is also
inspired by a Tarzan-like epic about a wolf boy called ‘Wolves at the Door’. See Edward Gross, ‘May
the Borg Be With You’, Retrovision, no. 2 (1999): 92-96.
33. Odo’s (and Laas’) appearance away from the home world as infants are explained in terms of a
third move, namely to disperse a hundred infants in space, thus replacing what had been systematic and
direct exploration of the universe with random and indirect ways of establishing new relations. This
third response stands in counter distinction to the push towards order, inasmuch as it seems to be a way
of reaching out to a chaotic world by making the boundary between the ordered self and the disorderly
other more, and not less, orderly.

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The system of external relations established by the Founders is problematic in

one specific regard. Future relations with other worlds are not intended to be
between sovereigns. They are to be ‘post-diplomatic’, in the sense that the
Founders have adopted a world view where there is no need for diplomacy. The
Founders see the rest of the world as something it is up to them to order in their
own image, something to bring under direct imperial control. The specificity of the
other worlds may be maintained, but that specificity cannot be ordered according
to the political principle of sovereignty, only of suzerainty.34 The founders are seen
to dabble in typical diplomatic functions, like forging alliances with other species
(notably the Cardassians), and they orchestrate a wide variety of relations with a
number of other political entities from their position as an imperial centre.
The Borg are post-diplomatic in a rather more thoroughgoing sense than are the
Founders. Their goal is ‘to reach perfection’; to reach a state of absolute order.
Their way of doing this, however, is not to establish suzerain relations with other
worlds, but, as they put it on the eve of their assimilation of other species, to ‘add
your biomatter to our own’. As we learn in the TNG episode The Best of Both
Worlds, ‘[t]hey identify what is useful to them, then consume it’. Their goal is to
make the non-Borg world into more of the Borg same. Within that same, no
externality can be left to explore, and where there is no externality, there can be no
space of communication to traverse. Indeed, Borg communication is totally
internal; the image presented to the viewer is explicitly that of ‘a hive mind’, where
thought is collective and rapport instantaneous. If the founders and the Borg are,
nonetheless, liminars of diplomacy, and not simply alien to the concept, it is
because they recognise the value of communication in certain senses and in certain
situations. For example, when the Borg plan an invasion of the Earth in order to
add new biomatter to their own, they abduct Captain Picard, and enhance him
genetically to fit into their collective, but they let him maintain enough of his
individuality to allow him to present himself not as ‘[w]e are the Borg’, but as ‘I
am Locutus of Borg’. Locutus is Latin for ‘the one who addresses’, and addressing
a collective on behalf of another is a typical diplomatic function. Furthermore,
when the Borg fails to assimilate what they refer to as ‘species 8472’ and that
species retaliates by launching a potentially devastating attack against the Borg,
Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager is actually able to forge an alliance with
them.
If the founders and the Borg have corporealities that set them apart from
humanoids, the other kind of diplomatic liminars are distinct in an opposite
direction: their physiques are without exception strikingly sturdy. Physical
sturdiness goes with warlike ways and an adherence to particularly strict codes of
conduct.35 One example of this kind of liminar is the Hirogen, who capture

34. See Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977).
35. There is, therefore, a difference between species which we come to know well such as the Hirogen
and the Klingon on the one hand, and other sturdy, warlike species who only make cameo appearances
and who have prevalent and often explicitly anarchic leanings such as the Nausicaans and the Chalnoths
(of TNG’s ‘Heart of Stone and ‘Allegiance’, respectively) on the other. A number of their ways are

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Voyager and make its crew act out the role of Second World War allies to the
Hirogens’ own Nazis on ship’s holodeck. The Hirogen/Nazi infatuation with the
purity of blood and body is matched by their categorisation of other species as pray
to be hunted down and killed for sport. One does not communicate with one’s pray
in other modes than through the hunt. Diplomacy is, therefore, ruled out as a mode
of communication. Characteristically, the climax of the relationship between the
Federation and the Hirogen is reached when Captain Janeway is able to present and
have them accept a gift. The bearing of gifts is a standard diplomatic practice, and
for good reasons.36 As demonstrated in a classic study by Marcel Mauss, receiving
a gift involves accepting the bearer of the gift as an interlocutor, and that
acceptance carries with it a vague obligation to come up with a counter-gift at
some unspecified later stage.37 A tie is being formed, where the one who is able to
offer a gift and have it accepted gains recognition, and the potential position of
power, which comes with being the party that can afford to part company with
something. At the moment the Hirogen accept the gift, then, their way of life as
hunters, who do not have other dealings with their pray than to hunt it down,
comes to an end. By the same token, the Federation has succeeded in building a
foundation for diplomatic relations with them, which means that the Hirogen cease
to be diplomatic liminars.

Institutionalised Diplomacy in Star Trek

Like other social practices, diplomacy must have a certain permanence to be

worthy of the name. The Federation is seen to have treaty-regulated relations with
three types of political entities. First, there are the numerous worlds, which are
portrayed as clamouring to join the United Federation of Planets. Secondly, there
are a number of worlds—invariably described as somehow small—who follow a
policy of neutrality vis-à-vis the Federation. Thirdly, there are the other great
powers of the alpha quadrant of the galaxy. In addition to the Klingons, these
include the Romulans and the Cardassians. The shows do not explore the
diplomatic relations with the former two categories of entities in any depth. With
the exception of the Bajor planet that actually turns out to quite literally prove the
rule, the show concentrates on the formal diplomacy of the great powers.38

similar, but the former are hierarchically organised, the latter are not. As discussed below, the
distinction is the same as the often-made nineteenth century distinction between barbarians and savages.
36. ‘In 1651 the Dutch republic forbade its diplomats to accept gifts from foreign governments; and in
1692 regulations were issued in Sweden which for the first time specified the value of those to be given
to foreign representatives on their departure. In England I. Potemkin was the last Russian ambassador,
in 1681, to arrive in London bearing gifts to be presented in semi-oriental style to the king; he was also
the last to receive a present in the traditional manner when he left’. M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern
Diplomacy: 1450-1919 (London: Longman, 1993), 51; orientalism noted.
37. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London:
Routledge, 1990).
38. The planet Bajor is an illuminating exception, because it is of interest first and foremost as a third
party, which is inextricably linked to Federation-Cardassian relations and, at a later stage, Federation-

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There are sound reasons why institutionalised diplomacy is given little heed in
Star Trek. Standard operational procedures, and particularly smooth-running ones,
are duller than the unexpected. Harmony is duller than conflict. Even in institutes
which seemingly specialise on peace research, interest fastens on unruly entities at
war and in conflict, not on societies at peace and in harmony. The key reason for
this may be a human proclivity for variation. As Leo Tolstoy observes at the outset
of Anna Karenina, all happy families have the same story to tell, but every
unhappy family’s story is unique. Becoming is privileged over being in Western
culture generally. Business as usual is only seen as interesting if it leads to
something which is seen as a variation on a theme as somehow ‘new’ (but not too
new, then, as Star Trek repeatedly points out, it cannot be grasped at all). This
privileging of becoming over being may be traced in two different kinds of
narrative of progress, which are at the centre of the show’s two different
representations of diplomacy. One presents diplomacy as dissembling, the other, as
a universalising practice.
The first narrative of progress has to do with quantitative expansion. In political
terms, it takes the form of imperial expansion. The key here is that there is no
tension between the specific and the universal. As noted above, the Borg is the
perfect image of this process, so perfect that it is almost beyond any perceived
need to engage in diplomacy at all. The Cardassians and the founders make for
better examples. Interestingly, they are presented as having no diplomats; their
diplomatic functions are invariably carried out by the soldiers that run the entire
planet.39 Where the founders are concerned, they do have a diplomatic corps.
Actually, the founders have genetically enhanced an entire race, the Vorta, (who,
understandably, relate to their makers as gods) for the purpose of acting as their
intermediaries in relations with other worlds. These diplomats, we learn little by
little, are actually cloned on demand. For example, Weyoun, the Vorta who is
given the most prolonged and in—depth presentation—goes through eight different
gestations before he is retired. The diplomacy of the Cardassians soldiers and the
Vorta clones is as inauthentic as they are themselves. The first narrative of
progress, thus, spawns a representation of diplomacy marked by dissimilation,
subterfuge, a closeness to war etc. etc.
The second narrative of progress concerns qualitative embetterment. This
narrative has two foci: the bettering and enlargement of the self (barring ‘engage’
and ‘make it so’, ‘we work to better ourselves’ may be Captain Picard’s most often
repeated line), and the bettering and enlargement of the Federation. It is predicated
on a basic split between the specific and the universal, between microcosmos and

Founder relations. Federation diplomacy towards Bajor is at all times and quite unequivocally a
function of its relation with those two powers.
39. ‘Cardassians. People. Technologically advanced humanoid civilization. In the past, the Cardassians
were a peaceful and spiritual people. But because their planet was resource-poor, starvation and disease
were rampant, and people died by the millions. With the rise of the military to power, new territories
and technology were acquired by violence, at the cost of millions of lives sacrificed to the war effort’
[www.kroesen.demon.nl/startrek/rkalien03.html] (1 December 2001).

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macrocosmos, between individual and Federation. Progress is presented as a move

in the direction of a better fit between the two. The show makes a speciality out of
exploring questions of identity, and it does so within a tightly scripted band of
variety. On the one hand, the focus is almost invariably on the individual, and
‘[h]istorical forces remain largely external to character’, ‘the ultimate nightmare’
being the breakdown of the inner stability of the individual’.40 On the other, the
essential sameness of the individual is invariably stressed. The ex post facto change
of identity (if any) is always presented as a matter either of breakdown and
reconstruction, or of growth, and never as change in a less linear and ‘progressive’
sense. This is partly a necessity laid down by studio rules, which stress that
acceptable episode scripts must turn in the characters at the end roughly in the
shape that they found them. But exactly this bears out how basic this way of seeing
identity is to American individualistic culture in general. Finally and crucially,
identity is about fitting in; about joining.41 In Star Trek, individuals are joiners—
and planets are supposed to be joiners, too, making it their goal to join the
Federation—when they are ready, that is, when their training is complete.
Individuals (for example, mad scientists) or planets who go for isolation, who
choose to stay outside and not to join, are portrayed as morally deficient, or at best
dubious.
What emerges here is a standard republican theme on how the individual is
supposed to relate to the republic.42 There is isomorphism between the way
individuals behave towards one another and society at large, and the way worlds
behave to one another and, ideally, to that potential universal republic, the United
Federation of Planets. The basic representation of diplomacy in the show makes
the supposition that the Federation should be loved when known, and it is just a
question of time before everybody knows it.
A key point, however, concerns the show’s ability to be ironic about its most
dearly held representations. The difference between the two major representations
of diplomacy in Star Trek turns on two tightly intertwined factors: voluntariness,
and the preservation of specificity under potentially universal conditions. Quite
literally, a world of difference separates the two. This makes for an obvious
question: what if the difference is thinner and more permeable than the Federation
makes it out to be? To its great credit, the show actually poses this question a
number of times, perhaps most explicitly and incisively through the character of
DS9’s Lt. Commander Eddington. Eddington, who appears in ‘The Search’, is a
Macquis sympathiser in a Starfleet uniform. Former guerrillas turned regular

40. Richards, Star Trek in Myth and Legend, 57 and 31. ‘The premise of a time travel episode in Star
Trek is always that the modification of a single life can change history’. Ibid., 68.
41. In TNG’s Hollow Pursuits, Guinan says she never liked the idea of fitting in. This is a very fitting
remark from someone who has extra-sensory perception, whose existence in time and space has a
mysterious and elusive quality, and who earns her right to stay aboard the ship by taking up social slack
when tending the bar. Guinan was never meant to fit in, she is a liminar whose very existence reminds
everybody else about the need to fit in.
42. Nicolas Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

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soldiers are quite numerous in the show (they make up one half of the Voyager
crew), but the development of these characters is usually scripted as a pilgrim’s
progress from a warfare-first approach to the diplomacy-first approach, which
ostensibly characterise the Federation. With Eddington, on the other hand, there is
a conscious leaving behind of the Federation.43 Crucially, Eddington gives as his
reason that he finds its relationship to the non-Federation world, that is, its
diplomacy, to be imperial. ‘You are worse than the Borg’, he tells his former
captain; worse, because where the Borg sets out to assimilate the rest of the world
quite openly, the Federation sets out to assimilate worlds under false pretences, and
at the cost of making it impossible for other ways of life like that of the Maquis to
flourish. In a word, the difference between the show’s two major representations of
diplomacy is not really a difference, which makes a difference. To Eddington,
Federation diplomats all seem to have grabbed their metaphorical phasers and to
have them ready at all times.
The case of Eddington plays itself out during a war. In Voyager episode ‘Living
Witness’, the same theme is handled with a different twist. It opens with a black-
gloved Captain Janeway pronouncing that ‘[w]hen diplomacy fails, there’s only
one other option—violence’. She then goes on to perpetrate what she
acknowledges as genocide on a people called the Kyrians. It soon expires,
however, that what we are seeing is not a representation, but a representation of a
representation, a simulation of events, made by Kyrians and placed in a
commemorative museum some 700 years after the simulated events allegedly took
place. The holographic doctor, the ‘Living Witness’ of the episode’s title, is
retrieved from a museum exhibit and proceeds to set the record straight. The
episode’s major interest is in its reflection on revisionist history, and for our
purposes, the relationship between the representations of diplomacy on Voyager
generally, and in the post hoc Kyrian simulation of life on Voyager. What is an
ever-present possibility in the former, is brought out and made painfully explicit in
the latter. The reading, which seems to be invited is that things are like this, that all
diplomacy may sooner or later be replaced by the use of physical violence, but that
there are counter forces in the life of the Voyager crew, which curtail the
possibility from being actualised in its most naked form. Interestingly, whereas the
two representations of diplomacy are not played up, but rather crop up
surreptitiously, in the initial series, they erupt with seemingly increasing regularity
in DS9 and Voyager. Janice Bially has argued that ‘[t]he postmodern ethic
demands that authors make it their purpose to perpetuate diversity of subjectivity
and life-forms by giving narrative voice and political opportunity to as many
different subjects as are conceivable’.44 Star Trek does not quite fit that bill, but it
puts on a rather good show, including giving voice to forces that undermine the
liberal and universalistic representation of diplomacy, which is generally presented
to be such a hallmark of the United Federation of Planets and its Starfleet.

43. Eddington has a John the Baptist in TNG’s Ensign Ro.

44. Janice Bially, The Power Politics of Identity (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998).

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Conclusion

The above analysis invites the conclusion that the two major American
representations of diplomacy are reproduced in Star Trek. One key prerequisite for
the circulation of such representations between the show and its viewers, namely
isomorphism, has been demonstrated to exist. This hardly warrants the status of a
conclusion. As Greenblatt states, ‘[w]e can be certain only that European
representations of the New World tell us something about the European practices
of representation’.45 That Star Trek representations of diplomacy, which are
American, tell us something about American practices of representation, is a
truism. It is, however, interesting that Star Trek manages to acknowledge their
existence, juxtapose them, and with increasing frequency, demonstrate how they
overlap. This compares favourably with a number of US policy debates, where
carriers of one representation frequently do not even seem to acknowledge the
relevance, or even the possible existence, of this tension for US policy.
Actually, in a number of undergraduate and even graduate courses, IR as a whole
is still often represented as a fight between what is homogenised as ‘Realism’, on
the one hand, and ‘Idealism’, on the other. This way of framing IR invites the
mutual accusations that the former is associated with imperialistic and specificity-
flattening representations, while the latter is associated with diplomacy as
universalistic and difference-denying representation. The point here is not that
there are relative merits in such accusations, but that such a way of framing IR and
diplomacy is an either/or way of looking at the issue. By way of contrast, Star Trek
increasingly looks at the overlaps and tensions between the two. Already E.H. Carr
pointed out that the major drama of IR is the tension between idealism and realism,
and that decision making was a case of both/and, not either/or.46 Star Trek and Carr
arguably suggest a more fruitful way of inciting discourse about diplomacy than
does the run-of-the-mill American foreign policy debate.
One way of extending the scope of this conclusion would be by looking at Star
Trek from the margins. Such sites can be found in fandom, and UFO-logists.47
Where UFO-logists are concerned, a BBC documentary called Louis Theroux’
Weird Weekend followed a group out into the desert, and interviewed them. A
major theme in their responses was the need to organise an extra-terrestial

45. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 7.

46. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939).
47. On the web, Star Trek fandom pays heed to the topic of diplomacy. There is a ‘Klingon Imperial
Diplomatic Corps’ [www. klingon.org/KIDC], presenting itself as the diplomatic mission of the
Klingon empire to Earth, with departments scattered throughout the planet (‘[m]ore detailed information
on all these departments can be found in the Diplomatic Planetary Handbook, which is part of the
KIDC membership kit’). On the net site of the Romulan Star Empire [www.rsempire.org], one finds that
Romulan Star Empire Senate chairs representing the ‘CyberLegion’, ‘Fleet Command military forces’,
‘Praetorian Guard special forces’, ‘Tal Shiar covert operations’ are all filled, but that the chair of the
‘Judicial Praetor diplomatic corps’ is sadly vacant. For an ethnographic study of fandom based on 15
years worth of participation, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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‘people’s diplomacy’, which could play the role of welcoming committee for any
UFOs that might pop by. As one participant stated, ‘it is time to launch a
diplomatic effort’. We think ‘it is high time racism ended—God forbid we should
take it off the planet’. This was needed, a third UFO-logist insisted, not least since
it was the military, which was in charge of welcoming extraterrestrials on the state
side, and they were not necessarily the kind of people with the right skills to
communicate with off-worlders. A key topic in IR research, namely the
relationship between the practices of war and diplomacy, crops up here in a fairly
far-out setting. Whether Star Trek viewing may or may not account for these
particular incidents or similar ones, cannot concern us here (but one notes that the
woman who wanted to reach across the universe described Close Encounters of the
Third Kind as ‘my favourite movie of all time’). To an IR scholar, the major
question of interest may perhaps not be the representations of diplomacy in
marginal groups, but the extent to which these fringe phenomena also represent
more widely distributed such representations.
A second conclusion has to do with how they can be compared with our
historical reservoir of knowledge about diplomacy in general. Historically, the
present diplomatic system grew out of European Christianity. This is to say that a
number of similar cultural traits facilitated the establishment of diplomacy. The
same can be said for all other diplomatic systems known to have existed. The
Amarna system was embedded in a Babylonian-speaking world of already existing
trade relations. The diplomatic system of the Greek city states was embedded in a
tightly defined linguistic and religious setting.
It has been argued that ‘[e]xplorers do not reveal otherness. They comment upon
“anthropology”, that is, the distance separating savagery and civilisation on the
diachronic line of progress’.48 In the history of the modern diplomatic system, at
least, the major theme of the nineteenth century was the definition of, and the
extent to which, different political entities met a ‘standard of civilisation’.49 This
representation was in turn embedded in a general understanding of history as being
linear, progressive and teleological. The classical orchestration of this view of
human history as falling in three subsequent evolutionary stages; those of savagery,
barbarism and civilisation, is Louis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society. Morgan
actually purports to fix the shift from barbarism to civilisation in time and space as
follows:

The going down of the gentes and the uprising of organized townships mark
the dividing line, pretty nearly, between the barbarian and the civilized
worlds—between ancient and modern society…The Hellenes in general were
in fragmentary tribes, presenting the same characteristics in their form of
government as the barbarious tribes in general, when organized in gentes and

48. V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 15.
49. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984).

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 ‘Grab a Phaser, Ambassador’

in the same stage of advancement. Their condition was precisely such as might
have been predicted would exist under gentile institutions, and therefore
presents nothing remarkable. When Grecian society came for the first time
under historical observation, about the first Olympiad (776 B.C.) and down to
the legislation of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.), it was engaged upon the solution of a
great problem. It was no less than a fundamental change in the plan of
government, involving a great modification of institutions. The people were
seeking to transfer themselves out of gentile society, in which they had lived
from time immemorial, into political society based upon territory and upon
property, which had become essential to a career of civilization. In fine, they
were striving to establish a state, the first in the experience of the Aryan
family, and to place it upon a territorial foundation, such as the state has
occupied from that time to the present.50

If such representations have suffered some setbacks within academia, they still
seem to permeate general American political discourse. As recently as thirty years
ago, the US Government Bureau of Indian Affairs (which began life as an
outgrowth of the US War Department) actually categorised American Natives on a
scale from ‘Savage’ to ‘Adjusted’.51 Star Trek explicitly maintains the standard of
civilisation, and so it is one of the loci which ensure the continued sway of these
representations. The play with key terms like civilised and barbarian is in evidence
in TNG’s Lonely Among Us, where representatives of two applicant worlds to the
Federation from the Beta Renner solar system are on board. The Anticans are
carnivores, who insist on eating newly slaughtered animals (and a sub-plot of the
episode involves their capturing and eating a delegate from the rivalling world).
Upon being informed that the crew of the Enterprise does not eat meat, only
replicated meals, the head Antican mumbles ‘sickening, barbaric’. In TNG’s
Justice, the leader of the Edo comments on Captain Picard trying to overrule a
death sentence that the Edo have passed on one of his crew by describing the
sentenced crew member as ‘an advanced person who luckily escaped the barbarism
of this backward little world’.
It is easy to write off the invocation of a standard of civilisation in Star Trek as
utter prejudice. It is less easy to think how, in a setting where the issue is the
forging of dialogue leading, perhaps, to diplomacy, one could act on other
precepts. If there is an interest in institutionalising relations—that is, if there is a
diplomatic intent—then recognition of otherness has to be paired with certain
minimum requirements in terms of communication, predictability and reciprocity.
Critiques of how quickly and in what manner those criteria are invoked, are
important and indeed necessary. It is also important to highlight the cost of

50. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from
Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, ed. Eleanor Bruke (Leacock Cleveland, OH: Meridian,
[1877] 1963), 154, 222-23.
51. Theodore W. Taylor, The Bureau of Indian Affairs (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984). I thank Irena
Sumi for directing me to this source.

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Millennium

entering into and maintaining diplomatic relations, in the sense that it necessarily
involves effects on the other parties involved. Such critiques must, however,
acknowledge the enormity of the dilemmas involved. Perhaps the most interesting,
and I should like to add depressing, thing about Star Trek, is that these dilemmas
are captured and circulated to viewers in ways which do not jar with what we know
from the historical record about diplomacy and its prerequisites. It is not only that
Star Trek props up widely held representations. It is also that it highlights a tension
between them, which is deeply embedded both historically and sociologically, and
from which there is no easy escape. There is always the possibility that
ambassadors must ask other representatives of their community to grab their
phasers; or indeed that they must do it themselves.

Iver B. Neumann is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of

International Affairs, Oslo, Norway

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