Saving face in diplomacy: A political sociology of face-to-face interactions in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
| Author | Deepak Nair |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118822117 |
research-article2019
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Saving face in diplomacy:
2019, Vol. 25(3) 672 –697
© The Author(s) 2019
A political sociology of face-
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118822117
DOI: 10.1177/1354066118822117
to-face interactions in the
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Association of Southeast
Asian Nations
Deepak Nair
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
Face-saving is a ubiquitous yet under-theorized phenomenon in International Relations.
Prevailing accounts refer to face-saving as a shorthand for status and reputation, as a
“cultural” trait found outside Euro-American societies, and as a technique for defusing
militarized inter-state crisis, without, however, an explanation of its source and
repertoire. In this article, I argue that it is possible to recover face-saving from cultural
essentialism, and that face-saving practices geared to avoid embarrassment are micro-
level mechanisms that produce international institutions like diplomacy. Drawing on
the work of sociologists Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu, I propose a theory of
face-saving that accounts for its source, effects, and variation. I evaluate this theory with
a study of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a diplomacy that has
long espoused a discourse of “saving face” couched in Asian cultural exceptionalism.
I combine a political sociology of ASEAN’s ruling regimes with an ethnography of
its diplomats based on 13 consecutive months of fieldwork in Jakarta, Indonesia, to
substantiate this wider theoretical argument. I demonstrate that, first, ASEAN’s face-
saving practices are rooted in the legacies of authoritarianism rather than essentialist
“culture,” and, second, that face-saving practices enable performances of sovereign
equality, diplomatic kinship, and conflict avoidance among ASEAN’s diplomats. This
article grants a distinct conceptual space to face-saving in International Relations,
contributes to international practice theory by situating practices in the context of
state–society relations, and offers a novel interpretation of what the “ASEAN Way” of
doing diplomacy looks like in practice.
Corresponding author:
Deepak Nair, Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Arts & Social
Sciences, AS1, Level 04-10, 11 Arts Link, Singapore.
Email: poldn@nus.edu.sg
Nair
673
Keywords
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, diplomacy, ethnography, international political
sociology, practice theory, saving face
Introduction
Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself [sic]
stubbornly remains a deity of considerable importance.
(Goffman, 1967: 95)
The business of saving our faces and the faces of others is essential to orderly, predicta-
ble, and peaceful social intercourse. In everyday life, we come into the face-to-face
presence of others at elevators, streets, and meeting rooms, and even in mediated forms
over emails, telephone calls, and social media. To these budding interactions, we supply
an image of ourselves, which, at once, must sustain a positive evaluation of our self-
image and must sustain the images of others before us, regardless of whether we believe
or feign our acceptance of them. This “image of the self delineated in terms of approved
social attributes” is what sociologist Erving Goffman (1967: 5) calls face. To be “in
face,” “maintain face,” and not “lose face,” one must keep handy an array of doings and
sayings that “save face,” that is, prevent and manage the experience of embarrassment.
To be sure, not all human interaction involves face-saving — the prosaic insult captures
a class of activity designed par excellence to embarrass and make others “lose face.”1
However, not playing the face-saving game has adverse consequences. The individual
who “unfeelingly participate[s] in his own defacement is thought to be ‘shameless,’”
(Goffman, 1967: 10), while the individual willing to countenance the defacement and
humiliation of others is deemed “heartless,” inconsiderate, and unreliable for social
interaction. Without a taken-for-granted knowledge of how to save our faces and those of
others around us, our everyday lives would crumble under the strain of perennial discord
over the validity of our self-images and of the deference due to them.
The significance of face-saving in bringing order to our everyday lives contrasts with
how under-studied and under-theorized this phenomenon is in diplomacy and International
Relations (IR). To be sure, “saving face” does rear its head in accounts of deterrence
(Schelling, 1966), foreign policy analysis (Greis, 2004), experimental psychology
(Renshon, 2015), diplomacy studies (Berridge, 2005; Cohen, 1991), and IR theory
(Friedrichs, 2016). These accounts of saving face use the term either as (1) a shorthand
for reputation and status, (2) a cultural trait that explains behavior outside Euro-American
societies, or (3) a technique of crisis de-escalation, without, however, an account of its
source and repertoire. The implications of these treatments for the study of face-saving
are unhelpful: it is left undefined and unelaborated, eyed with suspicion as a pernicious
category to Orientalize the Other, and rendered disagreeable for social-scientific enquiry.
In this article, I argue that it is possible to recover face-saving from cultural essential-
ism, and that face-saving practices geared to avoid embarrassment are micro-level mech-
anisms that produce international institutions like diplomacy. Specifically, face-saving:
enables the performance of sovereign equality on the back of status equality; fosters
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European Journal of International Relations 25(3)
in-group identity and cohesion; and serves as a micro-foundation for conflict avoidance
in interactions among diplomats and statesmen. To make this argument, I develop a the-
ory of face-saving by drawing on the work of sociologists Erving Goffman and Pierre
Bourdieu. While Goffman’s study of everyday interactions offers a universal conceptual
vocabulary to recover face-saving practices in diplomacy, a Bourdieu-inspired political
sociology explains variation in face-saving by interrogating how power is ordered in a
given social context (rather than explaining with essentialist group traits).
I evaluate this theory by examining the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN).2 ASEAN may seem an “easy” case because of the salience of “saving face”
in the discourse of its practitioners, couched in terms of “Asian values” and “mentali-
ties,” but it is also the “hard” case for recovering face-saving from its colonial-Orientalist
heritage and in making it reusable is social-theoretic terms. ASEAN is also appropriate
because — notwithstanding this long-standing discourse of “face” — there is no schol-
arly treatment of what face-saving is doing in ASEAN’s diplomacy, of where it comes
from, and of its effects. I combine a wide-angled political sociology of ASEAN’s ruling
regimes with ethnographic fieldwork for 13 consecutive months among its diplomats in
Jakarta, Indonesia, to interrogate the repertoire and effects of face-saving. This examina-
tion yields two findings that illuminate the wider theoretical argument. First, it demon-
strates that ASEAN’s face-saving practices are not rooted in essentialist “Asian values,”
but emerged from the configuration of personalized leaderships, conservative ruling
groups, and foreign policy institutions fostered under authoritarian political arrange-
ments. Second, it ethnographically teases out how quotidian face-saving practices enable
the routine performance of sovereign equality among ASEAN’s diplomats, fosters group
cohesion, and underpins a formula of conflict avoidance via a structure of iterative, infor-
mal, and discreet face-to-face interactions rather than legal instruments.
This article makes three core contributions to IR. First, it offers a novel conceptualiza-
tion and theorization of face-saving in world politics. It problematizes prevailing uses of
face-saving in IR (as “reputation,” “status,” “culture”) and returns face-saving to the fold
of social theory, where it is conceptualized as an everyday practice geared to avoid
embarrassment with constitutive effects on social life. To be sure, this conception is rec-
ognized in recent practice-interactionist studies of diplomacy. Rebecca Adler-Nissen
(2012: 18) argues that diplomacy “can be seen as a particular form of impression man-
agement, which is focused on face-saving — both of the diplomat and of the nation that
s(he) represents.” Similarly, Alisher Faizullaev (2017: 76) observes that “face-saving
corresponds to the essence of diplomacy.” This article goes a step further. It offers a
systematic conceptualization of face-saving and also develops a theory of face-saving.
This theory explains where face-saving comes from (both a general social theory and a
particular historical sociology of a concrete instance of this practice) and its effects, and
suggests why it might vary across social contexts. While a comprehensive test of the
theory is beyond the scope of this article, the theory offers a general framework that is
capable of being attentive to historical and contextual specificities.
Second, this article contributes to international practice theory (IPT) by...
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