Diplomatie: een organisatie in beweging (II)

Abstract

On the basis of governmental publications a mainly statistical analysis is given of changes in the Foreign Service of the Netherlands. The diplomatic organisation can be divided into the following categories: ’consulary service’, ’foreign service officers, ’bilateral representation’ and multilateral representation’. The growth of the diplomatic organization in the postwar years can be traced back to the growth of representation, mainly multilateral representation (Figures 1, 2 and 3). Comparison with Norwegian data reveals that the same trend appears in the Norwegian diplomatic organization. In the third section an analysis is made of the effects of tensions in the formal hierarchy of the diplomacy. A Dutch diplomat can formally be forwarded with a ’personal title’ belonging to one rank higher in the hierarchy than he actually occupies. Table 4 shows that this practice was more and more applied in postwar years and that it centers around rank level III. There also are some formal possibilities to appoint foreign service officers in another than the officially prescribed way. These ’irregular’ appointments occured mainly during the first ten post-war years (table 5) and include about 1/3 of all appointments in the entire post-war period (table 6). The ’irregulars’ leave the diplomatic service sooner than the ’regulars’ (table 7), the ratio for the whole post-war period being 3 : 1 (table 8). In section 4 comparisons are made between formal and actual progress of the diplomatic career of the ’regulars’ (figure 6). Also the relation between career speed and preparatory training is analyzed (table 13).