Introduction to Part I In international politics, negotiation consists of discussion

between officially designated representatives that is designed to achieve the

formal agreement of their governments to a way forward on an issue that has
come up in their relations. Negotiation, as noted in the Introduction to this book,
is only one of the functions of diplomacy and, in some situations, not the most
urgent; in traditional diplomacy via resident missions, neither is it the activity to
which most time is now generally devoted. (Although when diplomats 'lobby'
some agency of the state to which they are accredited, as they have always
spent much of their time doing, the only differences from negotiation are that the
dialogue is configured differently and any successes are not formally registered.)
Nevertheless, negotiation remains the most important function of diplomacy. This
is, in part, because the diplomatic system now encompasses considerably more
than the work of resident missions, and negotiation becomes more and more its
operational focus as we move into the realms of multilateral diplomacy,
summitry, and that other growth sector of the world diplomatic systemmediation. Furthermore, it hardly needs labouring that it is the process of
negotiation that grapples directly with the most threatening problems, whether
they be economic dislocation, environmental catastrophe, war, or - as at the time
of writing - global financial meltdown. It is because negotiation is the most
important function of diplomacy that the first Part of this book is devoted to this.
Students of negotiations, notably Zartman and Berman, divide them into three
distinct stages: those concerned with prenegotiations, formula, and details. The
first two chapters of Part I hinge on these distinctions, Chapter 2 dealing with
prenegotiations and Chapter 3 with the formula and details stages together'around-the-table' negotiations