Those Maddening Modalities

TWO hundred years ago, Jean Jacques Rousseau described peace parleys as "a species of general diets where one deliberates in common as to whether the table will be round or square, whether the chamber will have more or fewer doors, whether such and such a plenipotentiary will have his face or his back turned toward the window, whether such and such another will take two steps more or less while making a visit, and upon a thousand other questions of equal importance, uselessly debated for the past three centuries." Things have scarcely changed since.

To dignify their often absurd arguments over such ceremonial questions, diplomats talk about "modalities." The word is derived from "modal," which pertains to form as opposed to substance --and history is studded with episodes where wrangles over form all but prevented negotiators from ever getting down to substance.

Most maddening of all the modalities has been the problem of precedence. It took nearly six months to sign the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, for example, because the representatives of France and the Holy Roman Empire never could agree about who should walk into the conference room first; they finally agreed to enter together, and so ended what was known as the War of the Grand Al liance. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson adopted the rule of "pellmell" for diplomatic meetings--whoever arrived first, entered first. That solution has long since been dropped by protocol-conscious officials. Numerous efforts have been made to regulate matters of precedence. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 established four classes of diplomatic representatives (ambassadors and Papal legates; ministers plenipotentiary; ministers resident; charges d'affaires). Heads of state remained a problem; at Vienna, the conference hall had no fewer than five doors to cope with the attending monarchs.

The problems persisted. Thus the 1945

Potsdam Conference ground to a halt while whole phalanxes of foreign officers fretted over who should enter first. They finally found a room with three doors so that Churchill, Stalin and Truman could come in simulta neously. Another near impasse was averted at the conference's end when Stalin insisted that he be the first to sign, since the British Prime Minister and the U.S. President had each been first in two previous conferences. Harry Truman refused to make a fuss about it. "You can sign any time you want to," he snorted. "I don't care."

With only two doors accommodating four delegations at the Paris peace talks, there are certain to be similar hassles un less the U.S. and South Vietnamese of ficials agree to walk in (or sidle in) side by side, and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong functionaries do the same.

The size and shape of negotiating tables is another problem that has confounded many a diplomat. At the 1959 Geneva Conference of the Big Four, a protracted dispute was finally ended when the U.S., Russia, Britain and France agreed to sit at a round table while the East and West Germans sat at small, square, separate tables precisely six pencil widths from the main table. To solve the present impasse in Paris, some officials have suggested that no formal tables be used--but then the negotiators would argue over the size and shape of the coffee tables that would be needed to accommodate their ashtravs, water pitchers and doodling pads.

The Korean armistice talks, which have dragged on through 275 sessions, have provided some classic examples of the use of punctilio to shatter a rival's composure. At one of the first meetings, North Korea's General Nam II provided himself with a particularly high chair and seated U.S. Admiral C. Tur ner Joy on a low one. Joy saw to it that the chairs were of equal height from then on. When the allies set out a small United Nations table flag, the North Koreans followed suit--only theirs was six inches taller. In this case, however, Joy "hastened to veto any tendency toward such competition," as he wrote in his book, How Communists Negotiate, "thereby perhaps averting construction of the two tallest flagpoles on earth." The meetings have now turned into what one participant calls "the battle of the bladder." They often run for eight hours, and if any of the senior members leaves the table before the ses sion is formally closed, the other side interprets it as a deliberate walkout. The talks are also spiced with undiplomatic language. When U.S. Army Major General Richard Ciccolella was the senior United Nations member last year, he regularly prefaced his remarks to North Korean Major General Pak Chun Kuk with the phrase: "Pak, you bastard." Pak, in turn, snapped at Ciccolella when the American's attention strayed during an involved explanation of a document: "Look at the goddamn chart."

Probably the nastiest problems of all are posed when heads of state get together. In 1475, England's Edward IV and France's Louis XI met in the mid dle of a bridge spanning the Somme near Amiens, with a thick oaken lattice separating them, to settle a war in Picardy. The three feuding princes of Laos --Souphanouvong, Souvanna Phouma and Boun Oum, similarly met in the middle of a bridge over the Nam Lik River in 1961 to launch the talks that eventually led to the country's tenuous neutralization. When Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia met in 1807 to carve up Europe in the Treaty of Tilsit, the site for preliminary talks was an elaborate barge anchored in the River Memel in Prussia. The precedence problem was solved by having the two monarchs set out simultaneously for the barge from the river banks; Napoleon, naturally, provided himself with the faster boat and arrived first.

That historic confrontation will have an echo next week when Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Laos' King Savang Vatthana meet. The two monarchs will throw ceremonial switch es opening a power line from Thailand's Ubolratana Dam to the Nam Ngum Dam in Laos. But the meeting presented some nearly insuperable problems. The middle of the Mekong River, boundary between the two countries, was chosen as a meeting place. The Laotians took over a river-borne gin mill called the Ruen Phae (Floating House) and refitted it a la Napoleon, with gold cloth, a red carpet, flags and, of course, thrones of equal height. But how should the thrones be placed? "It was improper to seat the two side by side since one of them would be on the left, the lesser position," explained a Thai official. "They also could not face each other at the border since that is the usual stance for a peace treaty after hostilities." For a while, it was thought that the kings would have to sit at 45-degree angles to one another. Finally, protocol experts from both countries decided that it would not be so bad, after all, to have them facing one another.

That the ever-so-sensitive negotiators in Paris can solve the modalities of their conference with such aplomb, however, may be too much to hope. So far, nobody has suggested meeting aboard one of the bateaux mouches that ply the Seine--but who knows?

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