| dc.description.abstract | Thomas Niles served as a United States foreign service officer from
1962 to 1998. His service included three terms as ambassador: to Canada, the
European Community, and Greece. He reflects here on the continuities in the
diplomatic profession, and, in particular, on embassies, during a period of
notable historic change. While many of the protocols and responsibilities of
embassies remained more or less the same as they had been for over a century,
there were hints that those, too, were about to change in unforeseen ways, even
calling into question the central role of embassies as representing and serving
the nation-state, as the other articles in this issue discuss. Nevertheless, to this
ambassador, at least, even dramatic changes in technology, politics, and culture
rarely happen all at once; and the institutions and the people adapting to them
may be more cautious or durable than they sometimes appear in retrospect. | en_US |
