There are sometimes rank fights, especially among people who are nearly equal.
Even meaningful suggestions from the rival are then discarded because one is afraid of increasing it, and after he has spoken for a long time, one's own contribution must by no means be shorter.
Such situations are difficult above all because the ones you fight against are the same ones who should acknowledge your own primacy.
The opponent is also wooed as a possible admirer.
There is therefore no third party who would be independent enough to decide the dispute because his own rank does not depend on this decision. This changes in the case of secured differences in rank. The superior does not have to solicit the support of the subordinates, because recognizing his priority is one of the member's duties. But the employees can compete for the favor and respect of their boss. Your quarrel with one another is diverted and thus defused, and with a little skill you can even lead it in the absence of the respective competitor.
However, this solution to the problem comes up against two different limits, which sometimes even coincide: when the heads of different hierarchies meet and when it comes to equality of rank as a prerequisite for open-ended negotiations.
Following on from sociological studies, the sociologist Ramy Youssef has now presented an essay that recalls the considerable weight of such questions of rank in the early modern period.
The competition between the courtiers could be decided by the king, but there was no such authority for the meeting of the kings themselves, and the same applied to the preparatory meetings of their messengers and emissaries.
Lot decides who is the more powerful ruler
At the time, experts in “natural law” wrote book after book in order to find criteria for the correct assignment of rank, but that only led them to discover ever new points of view, between which there was no transitive order. Not even the age of a nobility could reliably assert itself against other bases of rank. The indirect competition was replaced by direct battles of rank, and the fact that it was always about the rank of entire noble families and dynasties added to the situation.
Attempts at solving the problem resulted in limiting the expected subordination to the situation. Some were given the opportunity to participate incognito and thus without consequences of an inferior situation rank for their own personality. Others found themselves subordinate only by a one-off drawing of lots, still others sent subaltern in the hope that their possible defeat in the status struggle would be attributed to their status instead of to that of their rule.
According to Youssef, one of the main sources of these problems was that at that time a natural hierarchy was still being sought: the differences in rank between the centers should be reflected in the interaction between their ambassadors. It was not until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that the idea of a hierarchy that only applies to diplomatic relations itself came up. It was based on the neutralization of the rank gap among the sending states. Since then, there has been only one hierarchy among the envoys of all states, large and small, which is headed by the respective ambassadors. The protocol thus privileges the ambassador of the small state over the envoy of the world power, and accordingly the small state can also meet the ambassador of that world power on an equal footing,simply by sending his own ambassador.
One of the costs of this artificial regulation of rank is that it burdens diplomats with “status incongruence”.
One can imagine that Americans would be expected to find themselves on the same level as diplomats at all ranks, who they consider to be emissaries of rulers of tyranny.
On the other hand, as Youssef notes, there are now so many performance areas in which states are continuously compared, from football to economic growth to human rights loyalty, that a congruently good or congruently bad performance in all these respects is only rarer and in any case inconsistent coincidence comes about.
In the age of constant international competition for list places in very different rankings, every state has to draw material and time limits for its own pride.