How diplomacy evolves: the global spread of honorific state awards

Almost every polity uses state awards as diplomatic tools. Their global spread, however, cannot be explained by dominant theories of International Relations (which focus on military or economic rationales) or of diplomatic practices (which lack criteria for what constitutes a functionally suitable practice). The success of such seemingly non-instrumental tools may be better explained with a combination of Modern Systems Theory with the evolutionary scheme of variation/selection/re-stabilization: the diplomatic system generates a variation of practices, enacts selection through the structural medium of peace, and stabilises the selected variant through legal formalization and global diffusion. Using this framework, this paper finds that state awards found worldwide ubiquity for two reasons: First, they satisfy the diplomatic system’s societal function related to peace and power, that is, the foregrounding of peace-and-amity while invisibilizing power-and-enmity. Second, state awards exhibit a high degree of generalizability, meaning that they are so flexible that any state can use them towards any other states for any reasons at any time. This paper carries implications for understanding seemingly trivial, noninstrumental features of diplomacy, and, more generally, for the value of Modern Systems Theory and evolutionary perspectives in International Relations.