| What happened when diplomats and bureaucrats, who tended to be conservative and wed to tradition, encountered the telegraph, a potentially revolutionary mode of communication? Foreign ministries initially hesitated to adopt telegraphy. It seemed a bourgeois technology that subverted prevailing notions of decorum and threatened the identity of diplomats as gentlemen of leisure. Moreover, such factors as expense, intercepted or garbled messages, and institutional inertia made foreign policy bureaucracies wary of this new technology, and shaped how they employed it. In the long run, however, the onset of diplomatic telegraphy contributed to a number of important trends: the increased bureaucratization and centralization of foreign ministries, the rising importance of signals intelligence, the declining autonomy of diplomatic envoys, and, perhaps most important, the accelerated speed of international crises. The faster pace of diplomatic disputes invited more emotional and less creative decisions on the part of statesmen, while public opinion, which sometimes moderates over the course of a long crisis, often exercised a belligerent influence on shorter crises. In addition to providing new capabilities, electric telegraphy placed new strains on foreign ministries and created new problems, the solutions to which sometimes produced difficulties of their own.; This dissertation uses archival materials (gathered in the United States, Germany, Britain, and France) and secondary sources to examine its subject. |
