Before rapid communication by telegraph, diplomacy was done by sending ambassadors to represent a nation’s interests. When agreements were made by the ambassador with the other nation’s leaders (or local representatives), the agreement would have to be taken home and certified by the actual leaders of the nation that had sent the ambassadors, right? So what happened if an agreement wasn’t certified (because the ambassador’s negotiated treaty wasn’t acceptable)? Did the ambassador more-or-less have to resign (after all, if his government declined a deal he negotiated, who’s going to believe any other treaty he tries to make)? Was there a generally accepted protocol for things like this?
That’s what the term “plenipotentiary” meant - that the person had full authority to make agreements, being fully briefed on his home government’s position, and to make a commitment on behalf of the government. He had “full powers”.
Which would mean that if he messed up significantly (gave away too much) that it would be a major crisis since the nation’s credibility would be at stake if they tried to repudiate the agreement, I guess. I wonder if that kind of thing ever happened?
Ad yet, the US, at least, has a constitutional process for ratifying a treaty, with no method of delegating that power to an ambassador. And I imagine it’s similar in many other countries. So it’d presumably still be possible to fail to ratify what the ambassador negotiated.
It predates modern diplomacy by a couple of millennia (in Europe at least it was a result of the reformation, before that priests furfilled the role as they we consider neutral intermediaries, which stopped being the case after the reformation) but there are famous examples from the roman world where this happened.
A defeated general negotiated a peace from a position of weakness that allowed him to escape alive. But the peace was then rejected by the senate as not acceptable (seeing as it was negotiated from a position of weakness something the romans abhorred). Obliging the general to return to the carthaginians and tell them this, knowing the result would be the rather unhappy carthaginians torturing him to death.
In the American system, yes, but not all countries have that approach to ratification. In a parliamentary system, if the plenipotentiary stayed within the terms of the mandate from the government, it would be very unusual if it were not implemented by Parliament.
The best example in the US system of the Senate rejecting a treaty was the Treaty of Versailles, personally negotiated by the President himself.
Keep in mind that a lot of diplomatic agreements don’t require formal treaties. If the American ambassador says “we’ll send some of our troops to help you with this natural disaster,” then no treaty is needed, because the president has the power to do that unilaterally. (At least for a while.) Additionally, the president has broad powers under American law to unilaterally enact certain trade policies and sanctions, which diplomats can negotiate about without requiring treaty ratification. And other times, there may be a treaty in place which gives each side room to determine certain things by negotiation later; in such cases a diplomat will be empowered to engage in those negotiations.
The concept of a plenipotentiary is somewhat obsolete in that modern diplomats can easily check in with their governments in real time before committing themselves to any particular position. But it’s still understood that diplomats have very broad authority to represent the position of their governments and a country renegging on their diplomats’ agreements is a major international faux pas.
Yeah. If Wilson had been a Prime Minister and not a President, being unable to get a treaty that he negotiated through approval would lead to a failed vote of confidence in short order, I think.
Failure to have the treaty ratified would itself be a vote of non-confidence.
Thank you.
If Wilson had been a Prime Minister and not a President, then a vote of non-confidence would have been a specific act required to commence his removal from office. Like ‘recall’ or ‘impeachment’.
Not necessarily. An important government measure can be considered a matter of confidence, and if the government loses the vote in the Commons on that measure, there’s no need for a formal vote of non-confidence. By losing the vote on a major government measure, the government has demonstrated it has lost the confidence of the House.
The budget, for example, is always a confidence measure. If the government can’t get its budget through the House, it’s election time, without a formal vote of non-confidence. That happened in the Canadian House of Commons in 1979: the Clark government was in the minority and put forward its budget, which was defeated. Prime Minister Clark immediately advised the GovGen to dissolve Parliament and call an election (which he lost). However it wasn’t like an impeachment: having lost the confidence measure, he stayed on as PM until after he lost the election.
In the hypothetical that Prime Minister Lloyd George came back from Versailles and put the Treaty to the House, and the House defeated it, that would be considered a confidence matter, in my opinion, given the importance of the Treaty and the amount of personal involvement which Lloyd George had in its negotiations, especially since Lloyd George was leading a coalition government.
Considered by whom? Who makes that decision? What would happen if there were a PM who just said “No, that wasn’t a matter of confidence, and so I’m staying on”?
It looks like John Major explicitly made the Maastricht treaty a vote of confidence in his government (Maastricht Treaty - Wikipedia) (as a ploy, in essence).
At least in the Canadian system (the one I’m most familiar with), the budget and the speech from the throne (effectively an agenda-setting speech at the beginning of each Parliament) are always automatically confidence votes. But in addition, the government can announce “this motion is a confidence motion” if they think the motion is important enough that they’re willing to stake their government on it.
In practical terms, this doesn’t matter if the ruling party has a majority in Parliament; they can usually “whip” enough votes to get the confidence motions to pass. But if the ruling party has a minority, announcing “this is a confidence vote” can be a useful ploy to get the smaller parties to vote your way. If the smaller parties aren’t in a position to immediately run an election campaign when the vote is taken in Parliament, they may be more inclined to hold their noses and fall in line. Alternately, smaller parties can use their leverage to extract policy changes from the ruling party. For example, in Canada the left-wing NDP voted for the October 2020 speech from the throne after new worker benefits were added to it, thereby avoiding a snap election.
(@Northern_Piper: feel free to correct me on any or all of this. I’m just an expat and you’re obviously more versed in Canadian law & politics than I am.)
A vote is a vote of confidence (at least in Canada) if it is a money bill like the budget, or if the leader declares it a vote of confidence. A leader might do that as a game of chicken to force hesitant members to back him or face an election.
Also, a government that fails to get a core (non-money) piece of their platform passed, might instead force an explicit vote of confidence - “OK, you didn’t like that bill, but let’s see if you still think we should be governing”.
A government that fails a vote of confidence must resign. trying to defy that would probably bring the scorn of all right-thinking parliamentary members. Trying to deny procedure would bring chaos. Technically the Queen/Governor General can call an election on their own and remove the government, although that’s something basically never done - but nobody’s defied the vote of parliament either.
Instructive is the story of Premier Howard Pawley of Manitoba in 1988 who contemplated ignoring a budget loss, but ultimately followed tradition. There had been some jockeying about bilingualism and the French minority and their language status in the province awhile before that. The Speaker of the legislature at the time (speaker is like Chairman), Jim Walding, had ignored strong-arm attempts by the premier to rule the way Howard wanted. As a result, Pawley sent people from his office to try to replace Walding at the next election nomination - and they failed.
So in the next election, Walding was elected in his riding after his own party leader tried to screw him over, was not made speaker, but was the swing vote for the government in an evenly divided legislature. He was effectively ostracized from his party, they did not communicate with him, but several times Pawley had to send people to round up Walding for crucial votes to avoid defeat.
Eventually Walding got tired of this stress, and for the key budget vote he cast the deciding vote against his party. Confirming his reputation as a slippery politician, Pawley and his inner circle spent all night trying to determine how they could get out of this dilemma. they apparently contemplated calling a confidence vote instead, but Walding confirmed he was fed up and done; cooler heads prevailed, and recognized that a defeat on the budget was an automatic election call. Pawley resigned and was replaced, but his party still lost the election.
I don’t understand this. In Quebec and in the national commons, the party leader has to sign off on all candidates who want to use the party label and can replace them at will. I have seen it happen.
A good example of the latter is the vote on the Conservatives motion for creation of a committee to look into “ethical problems” with government spending. It was clearly just the Conservatives looking to get a federally funded committee that would let them drag up everything they could to slag Trudeau and the Liberals. JT made this a confidence vote, on the basis that if they really believed the Liberal government was that corrupt, then they had, pretty much by definition, lost the confidence of the house, particularly since we have a minority government right now.
The Cons folded their hand, since this was pretty much JT calling their bluff. He knew that no one in their right mind wanted an election in the middle of the pandemic. This was just political grandstanding.
This is the sort of excitement I miss out on by living south of the border. Of course, we have our own brand of political excitement down here.
Wilson, IMHO, was the worst president of the 20th century.
He got us into WW1, likely was one of the main causes of WW2, and was a rabid racist.