Best Behaviour

The more I hear about international protocol, the more it resembles nothing more than the rigidly and repressively circumscribed world of Edith Wharton's New York in House of Mirth or any account of the American aristocracy at the turn of the century (I think). I'm also reminded of Joan Didion's (not entirely convincing) essay on 1950s Hollywood as the "last stable society" in the West, with its definite and unquestioned patterns of behaviour. International protocol, as far as I can tell, is based on the distinction between things that are "nice" and things that are "not nice". Crossing your legs and pointing your toes at your counterpart at meetings is not nice. Leaving wine glasses around where devout Muslims might see them is not nice. Kissing or otherwise physically handling the wives of conservative Chinese statesmen is not nice. Not finding out where the toilets are beforehand is not nice. (It's harder to define what's nice.) I'm not often in a work situation where what's nice defines what's correct, but then again, it may be as good a measure as anything we've come up with.