
Jessica Stark, Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France
The cable is one of the most common, routine forms of internal communication for diplomats, and yet its classified status has made academic study of the genre difficult. In this blog post, I provide a brief overview of the cable’s linguistic characteristics and comment on how it contributes to foreign policy-making by comparing two sets of leaked diplomatic cables. The first set was selected from the whistleblowing platform Wikileaks, which has published to date over 250,000 U.S. State Department cables written between 2003 and 2010[i]. I also rely on a more recent set of 23 diplomatic cables produced by the European Union’s diplomatic service – the European External Action Service (EEAS) – between October 2015 and July 2018[ii]. In a December 2018 press article, journalists David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger claimed that thousands of EU cables are believed to have been hacked over the years by Chinese intelligence agencies. Area 1, a firm founded by three former officials of the U.S. National Security Agency who discovered the breach, made more than 1,100 of the hacked cables available to the New York Times[iii].
The cable is an integral part of the institutional, organisational routines of diplomacy and timely, impactful reporting is particularly prized within the diplomatic community. Diplomats aim to be as exhaustive as possible in relaying information from the field back to their home foreign ministries, and regularly draft cables after meetings and events, or to comment on important foreign policy developments or trends in their host country. Additionally, cables are an embassy’s shopfront in terms of analytical policy input: they provide recommendations and advice for policy-makers back home. The cable therefore appears to combine both an informative and an analytical function, as a “mix of intelligence collection, analysis, and policy advocacy” (Palmer 2016: 217-18).
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