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Bhutan Foreign Relations
Historically, Bhutan's foreign policies were greatly
influenced
by Tibet. Bhutan acknowledged Tibet's influence over it
until 1860
and continued to pay a nominal tribute to Tibet until the
mid1940s , although not necessarily on a friendly basis.
Despite
religious and cultural affinities, most of Bhutan's elite
were
refugees who had fled Tibet for religious reasons over the
centuries. From 1865 to 1947, Britain guided Bhutan's
foreign
affairs. Thereafter Bhutan's foreign relations until the
early
1970s were under the guidance of India, with which Bhutan
had had
official diplomatic relations from 1949. During the 1970s
and
1980s, however, Bhutan became a member of the UN and its
affiliated
agencies; established formal diplomatic relations with
fifteen
other nations, primarily in South Asia and Scandinavia;
actively
participated in the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation
(SAARC--see Glossary)
and the Non-Aligned
Movement;
spoke out against, among other subjects, nuclear
proliferation and
terrorism; and had a peripatetic head of state who
traveled abroad
widely
(see table 31, Appendix).
By the early 1990s, Bhutan's
foreign
policies were effectively autonomous.
A shortage of diplomatic officials limited Thimphu's
missions
in New York and Geneva (established in 1985) and meant
that the
nation could only staff embassies in New Delhi, Dhaka, and
Kuwait.
Bhutan had only one employee, a computer programmer, at
the SAARC
headquarters in Kathmandu in late 1990. Only India and
Bangladesh
had representatives in Thimphu in 1991; other nations
generally
gave dual accreditation to their ambassadors in New Delhi
to enable
them to represent their countries' interests in Thimphu.
Similarly,
because of the shortage of diplomatic personnel, the head
of the
Bhutanese UN mission in Geneva, for example, also served
as
ambassador to Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands,
Norway,
Sweden, the European Economic Community (EEC), and several
UN
affiliates. The ambassador to Kuwait is accredited to
Switzerland
because of Swiss rules that disallow the UN representative
in
Geneva to also be accredited to Switzerland. Honorary
consuls
represented Bhutan in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, Osaka,
and
Seoul, and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) had an
honorary
counsel in Thimphu.
Bhutan had no formal diplomatic relations with the
United
States as of 1991. It was one of only seven sovereign
nations in
the world with which the United States did not maintain
formal
representation. Informal contact was maintained, however,
between
the embassies of Bhutan and the United States in New
Delhi, and
Bhutan's permanent mission at the United Nations in New
York had
consular jurisdiction in the United States. It has been
speculated
that Bhutan, in light of India's close relations with the
Soviet
Union, had elected to keep equidistant from both
superpowers.
Nevertheless, during a visit with a United States senator
in 1985,
the Druk Gyalpo personally expressed strong support for
the United
States as the principal bulwark against the Soviet Union
in South
Asia. The United States ambassador to New Delhi was among
numerous
emissaries of nations without diplomatic ties to pay
courtesy calls
in Thimphu in the 1980s. Contacts with the Soviet Union
and other
communist countries were nil.
Data as of September 1991
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