Seeing Is Believing: Summit Diplomacy and Public Perception of Security.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

What is summit diplomacy, and what does it do? Existing literature in International Relations (IR) considers the strategic motivation behind summit diplomacy by reducing it to leader-to-leader negotiations and interactions that are usually behind closed doors. Building on Erving Goffman’s theory of impression management in social interactions, I argue that summit diplomacy disrupts an audience’s international political reality as they know it because, as a public performance, a summit reproduces world politics materially. As a political elite-led public performance aimed at giving off some impression about the international political reality to influence an audience, an audience may interpret a summit by seeking their place in this performed reality. I confine the performance to being watched and interpreted by a domestic public audience while recognizing international audiences. A domestic audience’s impression of summitry performance is linked to their sense of ontological security or their need for minimal disruption to the continuity of their international political reality. Political elites, therefore, face a tension or dilemma between the reality they want to perform for strategic reasons and the reality that an audience expects. Attending to lay people’s ontological security needs associated with changes in foreign policy is thus essential so that public anxiety and resistance are minimized in light of strategic considerations. I look at the first summitry between two former or current adversaries: the 1972 US-China summit, the 1983-4 South Korea-Japan summits, and the 2000 US-Vietnam summit. I focus on the domestic audience reactions in the state where the particular summit was considered more controversial – the US and South Korea. Using original diplomatic archives, I show that political elites staged and performed these summits with the domestic audience in mind, mainly because the domestic audience would have some expectations as to what they would want to see in the particular performance. Discourse analysis of opinion polls, letters to newspaper editors, and focus group studies highlight two effects of summitry performances on public opinion. First, disruption in people’s need for stability and certainty in foreign policy change can be positive or negative. Summits, therefore, can “cushion” or minimize the disruption people feel when exposed to an elite-led performance of reality in world politics. Second, people relate to summits based on their impressions of a leader’s diplomacy and the other state’s intentions based on their identity. The dissertation raises essential implications about the need to “bring the public along” in foreign policy changes and performance in world politics as a construction of the international political reality. .