The field of diplomatic history has undergone a multidimensional expansion of scale in recent years. A dynamic New Political History has extended the scale of actors analyzed as “diplomats” by granting more importance to the role of private individuals and non-governmental institutions. This change of paradigm also led to a temporal rescaling, since the examination of a wider field of diplomatic actors also challenged standard periodizations, and to a broadening of the scale of sources beyond the traditional government documents from state archives. 

These new scales on the level of historiography parallel new scales of the practice of informal diplomacy itself. Since the years following the Second World War, traditionally bilateral practices of private and informal diplomacy have increasingly taken on a multilateral dimension. Additionally, and maybe even more remarkably, theses practices have been more and more institutionalized, leading to the formation of what I call Transnational Informal Governance Networks. 

The proposed paper aims to discuss these various problematizations of scale within diplomatic history based on an analysis of one such network: the highly secretive and exclusive political club Le Cercle, whose regular meetings during the Cold War brought together a broad range of conservative Western elites.