IT GIVES STATUS to a state to have resident ambassadors, as many as possible. I could hardly miss the displeasure of the enduring President Museveni in 1996 when I told him that I was to be accredited to his country from the neighbouring Tanzania. ‘What, Uganda less important than Tanzania? Never. What is Norway thinking of’, he said with his eyes. But as he was meeting with an ambassador from Norway and remembering our development programme he only muttered a vague weasel sentence ‘Oh, from there.’ Diplomatic wisdom prevailed and Norway soon had a resident ambassador in place in Kampala. My mellifluous words speeded the process. Who says that ambassadors are not effective? At least they create more ambassadors.

Diplomacy may be the oldest profession in the world but the envoy is not permitted to grow old in the posting. It is the inevitable fate to be moved after settling into a favourite foreign paradise. The Norwegian diplomatic service has a fine euphemistic word for it, flytteplikt, the duty to move. Adam was no diplomat, but Eve was. She was both extraordinary and plenipotentiary in the residence eastward in Eden when she told God that she had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because the serpent had beguiled her. She had immediately understood that the serpent was the common enemy and tried to negotiate. But Adam just blames ‘the woman’. If he had mediated with God they might not have been kicked out after only a bried ad interim posting and been allowed to remain for good as envoys en pied in Eden. What a paradise that would have made.

The diplomat is a pilgrim on a journey to a future life, always abroad. It is the condition to be what we do, the movement is a means to an end. Ein ruheloser Marsch war unser Leben und wie des Windes Sausen, heimatlos (Our life was a restless march and homeless like the whistle of the wind). The diplomat, like Schiller after completing Die Räuber, is a citizen of the world, not resident in one village or one town, in one country or one continent.