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.