Statesmanship Attributes and Application, Pseudo-Statesmanship, and Machiavellianism

Articulating Your Statesmanship
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Articulating Your Statesmanship
In the contemporary world characterized by individuals with selfish desires and those with genuine aspirations of serving the public, it is difficult to determine the person with good intentions. Politics is the backbone of everything in many nations today and control all actions. The situation is worse in capitalist nations, in which politicians are puppets to some powerful individuals whose main agenda is to fleece the public of its resources. These individuals sponsor politicians to act as statesmen and gain the favor of the public and after being voted in office, they do not serve the people who elected them but only focus on their interests and those of their sponsors.
Statesmanship
Statesmanship refers to morally excellent leadership at the polity level. History remembers great individuals in politics who passed the test for being state leaders owing to their leadership traits in times of war and crisis. Examples of such individual’s include Lincoln, Churchill, and DE Gaulle (Overeem & Bakker, 2019). The concept is used universally to refer to both male and females. Its association with males emanates from the fact that the concept if versed on the principles of the art of government and at the time of formulation of the term, there were no women who were active in conducting business of a government or in shaping politics. Thus, the term statesman mainly refers to a wise and respected political leader. The meaning of the term is frequently expressed during a crisis, where the people demand to have an individual with their interests at heart. There is an increasing desire to bring back the attention to an individual political agency. The people yearn for the times when individuals stood firm in their principles to fight injustice in the society. Sadly, modern political leaders do not present such a picture to the population. Most people perceive these leaders as hypocritical in nature based on their tendency to behave as though they care about the society at the time of campaigns but after elections, they revert to their old nature.
There is a thin difference between leadership and statesman. In most people’s eyes, both are leaders because they are charged with advancing and guiding people. The simple difference between these two terms is that a leader is any person that heads a team or a group of people whereas as states man is an individual who heads national or international affairs. Terry Newell presented a model in his book titled Statesmanship, Character, and Leadership in America. The author highlights six different factors that determine the quality of statesmanship that leaders are gauged. He notes that each of the six factors are equally important and hence do not have any specific order of preference. The first factor is the political context in which the public assesses a leader’s actions. The second factor is the leader’s character, which involves a combination of several features that include self-criticism, virtue, and leadership. The next three factors include the set of skills that the author notes every successful statesman ...