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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: CPC - Contemporary Political Communication
- Sprache: Englisch
New technologies have opened up fresh possibilities for public diplomacy, but this has not erased the importance of history. On the contrary, the lessons of the past seem more relevant than ever, in an age in which communications play an unprecedented role. Whether communications are electronic or hand-delivered, the foundations remain as valid today as they ever have been.
Blending history with insights from international relations, communication studies, psychology, and contemporary practice, Cull explores the five core areas of public diplomacy: listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchanges, and international broadcasting. He unpacks the approaches which have dominated in recent years – nation-branding and partnership – and sets out the foundations for successful global public engagement. Rich with case studies and examples drawn from ancient times through to our own digital age, the book shows the true capabilities and limits of emerging platforms and technologies, as well as drawing on lessons from the past which can empower us and help us to shape the future.
This comprehensive and accessible introduction is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners, as well as anyone interested in understanding or mobilizing global public opinion.
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Seitenzahl: 474
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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CONTENTS
Cover
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 Diplomacy through Foreign Public Engagement: Core Terminology and History
Terminology
The components of foreign public engagement
Listening
Advocacy
Cultural diplomacy
Exchange diplomacy
International broadcasting
Divergences and interrelationships
Propaganda
The history of propaganda in foreign policy
The emergence of US public diplomacy
Public diplomacy versus propaganda
The terrain of the new public diplomacy
Soft power
Meet the new superpower
This book
Notes
2 Listening: The Foundational Skill
The listening deficit
Definitions
Who listens?
Precedents for listening in public diplomacy
Great listeners in public diplomacy
Evaluation
Failures of listening
The challenge to effective listening: cognitive and social biases
Cognitive/social bias: who we listen to
Cognitive/social biases: what we listen to
Cognitive/social bias: when we listen
Cognitive/social bias: where/why we listen
Cognitive/social bias: ways/means of listening
Bias blindness
Designing the ideal listening process
Notes
3 Advocacy: The Cutting Edge
Advocacy in history
Advocacy and cognitive and social bias
Four core strategic approaches to advocacy
An integrated strategy: Churchill draws the United States toward World War II
The temptation of the covert
Meet the meme: the tactical level of messaging
Advocacy today
Notes
4 Culture: The Friendly Persuader
Terminology
A short history of cultural diplomacy
Nineteenth-century foundations
The era of the world wars
The cultural Cold War
The era of soft power
Evaluating cultural diplomacy
Types of cultural diplomacy actor
Core approaches to cultural diplomacy
Genres of cultural diplomacy
Notes
5 Exchange and Education: The Soul of Public Diplomacy
Foundations
The origins of educational exchanges
The emergence of modern international education and exchange
The case of the twentieth-century United States
Franco-German reconciliation
Dangers of exchanges/international education
Types of exchange
Final thoughts
Notes
6 International Broadcasting: The Struggle for News
Foundations
The history of international broadcasting
Advocacy and international broadcasting
State-sponsored news
Surrogates
Culture
Commercial
Counter-hegemonic
Interactive broadcasting
Resistance and misdirection
Contemporary international information management
Impact of new technology
Notes
7 Nation Brands and Branding: The Metaphor Run Amok
Foundations: the brand
Country-of-origin effect
Faux brands
The emergence of nation branding
Place making
The case of Germany
Applying nation branding
A word of warning
Being good
Notes
8 Partnership: The Emerging Paradigm
The case for partnerships
Partnerships and cognitive/social biases
Models of imperfect partnership
Partnership in public diplomacy
Partnership in listening: The BBC Monitoring Service and the FBIS
Partnership in advocacy/cultural diplomacy: The God that Failed
Partnership in exchanges: the EU’s ERASMUS program
Partnership in international broadcasting: Broadcasting for Child Survival
The collaborative turn: the US case
The collaborative turn: the UK case
Modeling good practice
Analysis: the BBC and the FBIS
Analysis: The God that Failed
Analysis: ERASMUS
Analysis: Broadcasting for Child Survival
Lessons learned: ten secrets of success
Collaboration and CVE: defeating ISIS/Daesh
Conclusion: reviving collaboration
Notes
Conclusion: Public Diplomacy and the Crisis of Our Time
Lesson 1: public diplomacy begins with listening
Lesson 2: public diplomacy must be connected to policy
Lesson 3: public diplomacy is not a performance for domestic consumption
Lesson 4: effective public diplomacy requires credibility
Lesson 5: sometimes the most credible voice is not your own
Lesson 6: public diplomacy is not always “about you”
Lesson 7: public diplomacy is everyone’s business
Need 1: to build reputational security
Need 2: to contest disinformation
Need 3: to counter victim narratives
Need 4: to articulate a vision of the future
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The Canadian public diplomacy pyramid
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
The Fisher/Bröckerhoff spectrum from Options for Influence (2008)
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Anholt’s hexagon for the United States as created from data collected during the…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Contemporary Political Communication
Geoffrey Craig, Performing Politics
Nicholas J. Cull, Public Diplomacy
Stephen Cushion & Richard Thomas, Reporting Elections
Robert M. Entman, Scandal and Silence
Max McCombs, R. Lance Holbert, Spiro Kiousis & Wayne Wanta, The News and Public Opinion
Craig Allen Smith, Presidential Campaign Communication (2nd edition)
James Stanyer, Intimate Politics
Katrin Voltmer, The Media in Transitional Democracies
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Emotions, Media and Politics
Public Diplomacy
Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age
NICHOLAS J. CULL
polity
Copyright © Nicholas J. Cull 2019
The right of Nicholas J. Cull to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9123-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cull, Nicholas John, author.Title: Public diplomacy : foundations for global engagement in the digital age / Nicholas Cull.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018032458 (print) | LCCN 2018045664 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745691237 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745691190 | ISBN 9780745691206 (pb)Subjects: LCSH: Diplomacy--Technological innovations. | Public relations and politics--Technological innovations. | Communication in politics--Technological innovations.Classification: LCC JZ1305 (ebook) | LCC JZ1305 .C85 2019 (print) | DDC 327.2--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032458
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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For Eytan Gilboa
Preface and Acknowledgments
This is a book about what Bruce Gregory of George Washington University has called “the public aspects of diplomacy.” It is written to provide a single foundational text for diplomat students and student diplomats. This book is not only about the emergence of new approaches to global public opinion; it was born because of them. At the turn of the millennium, I was Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. I had been writing and researching about the history of British and American propaganda for some years but had little opportunity to integrate that work into my teaching. I worked from time to time with the British Council but my role was to apply a multidisciplinary approach to the study of British identity. I got to talk about British science fiction television in Turkey and “Englishness” in Finland. The advent of the Blair government, with its focus on issues of international image, opened new avenues. My British Council contact – Nick Wadham Smith – was seconded to a new in-house think tank within the Council called Counterpoint, with a mandate to examine the future of British cultural relations. Nick and his boss Martin Rose invited me to give a keynote talk to the Council’s board and I found myself commenting explicitly on the contemporary implications of my historical research to an audience of British cultural figures. That was the first time I presented what became my five-element breakdown of public diplomacy. More seminars followed. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 accelerated this work. Suddenly, government and scholarly interest in public diplomacy kicked into high gear on both sides of the Atlantic. It was only to be expected that an academic institution would spot a gap in the market. The University of Southern California moved first. In 2003, working with the School of International Relations, the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as it was then known, launched its Center on Public Diplomacy. The next step was to offer a master’s degree in public diplomacy, and I was hired to direct it.
I arrived at USC in September 2005 but, before the master’s degree in public diplomacy had truly got underway, I was persuaded to take part in a further project from which these essays derive. The distinguished Israeli scholar Eytan Gilboa was attached to the Center on Public Diplomacy as a visiting fellow for my first year and proposed that he and I organize a summer institute in advanced public diplomacy for diplomats. The institute ran in the last two weeks of 2006 and the chapters in this book have evolved from lectures delivered at that time. In the intervening years, my research and teaching have happily converged. My first attempt to set these ideas in print came in 2007 when the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office commissioned me to write a short primer on public diplomacy for their own use. That work reached its final form as the booklet Public Diplomacy: Lessons from the Past (2008). This book is an expansion and updating of that work. In the years since, I’ve had wonderful opportunities to deliver and develop this material in classes for foreign ministries and diplomatic academies around the world, including those of Canada, Chile, India, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, South Korea, and Switzerland. Some audiences deserve special mention. For some years, I’ve served as a guest lecturer at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia. Chapters 1 and 3 will be familiar to FSI students. I am also honored to have taught this material as a guest lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University’s Center on Public Diplomacy as a guest of Professor Zhou Xinyu and for the Masters of Cultural Diplomacy of Catholica University of Milan as a guest of Professor Federica Olivares. This book was also shaped by the Spring Institute in Internet Diplomacy which I organized in March 2016, so thanks are due to Fadi Chehadi, then CEO of the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and his colleague Nora Abusita for making that happen. My motive for writing this was to pull together the lectures and material developed for reports into a fuller synthesis.
Any writing and research process requires support from family, friends, and colleagues. In writing this book, I am grateful to the directors of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy for keeping the Summer Institute going: Jay Wang, Philip Seib, Geoffrey Wiseman, and most especially Joshua Fouts, who gave Eytan and I the go-ahead for the original iteration and thoroughly spoiled us for his successors. The forays into psychology were inspired by the work of the third man in the original Summer Institute lineup, my USC Annenberg colleague Kelton Rhoads. Soumi Chattergee of UCLA has helped to clarify some of the finer points of what was new territory for me. I appreciate the rest of the public diplomacy team at USC, especially Bob Banks, Doug Becker, Pam Starr, and Conrad Turner, and my interlocutors around campus, especially Mina Chow, David Craig, Jerry Giaquinta, Garry Wexler, and the incomparable Robert Scheer. Colleagues beyond USC whose work has been influential on me or who have provided help include Amelia Arsenault, Martha Bayles, Caitlin Byrne, Ali Fisher, Kathy Fitzpatrick, Vasily Gatov, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Robert Govers, Bruce Gregory, Craig Hayden, Charlotte Lerg, Jonathan McClory, Jan Melissen, Ben Nimmo, James Pamment, Peter Pomerantsev, Sean Powers, Monroe Price, J. P. Singh, Nancy Snow, Cesar Villanueva Rivas, Rhonda Zaharna, and the late Benjamin Barber. James Pamment deserves a double mention for reading the whole work in draft and making it better by frankly pointing out its limits. I am grateful to friends who have allowed me to try this material on their students especially Barry Sanders at UCLA, Derek Shearer at Occidental College, and Senem Cevik at UC Irvine, and, further afield, Odette Tomescu-Hatto and Ronald Hatto at Sciences Po, Paris. Dalia Kaye and Sohaela Ameri at the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy were kind enough to invite me to try out my conclusion on their colleagues. The influence of Joseph Nye and Simon Anholt is present throughout. I’ve valued the opportunity to discuss US elements with the small band of practitioner/scholars Matthew Armstrong, Dick Arndt, Don Bishop, John Brown, Katherine A. Brown, Bill Rugh, and Mike Schneider. Adam Clayton Powell III and his colleagues at the Public Diplomacy Council have been a terrific home crowd for a number of relevant presentations and panel discussions in DC. The mentions of Canada show the influence of Evan Potter, Daryl Copeland, and Sarah E. K. Smith. I have learned much from friends in the UK foreign policy community and have been privileged to chew over some of these issues with distinguished retirees Ian Cliff and Martin Rose. A book like this also needs many conversations with serving diplomats of many nations over the years. I’ll spare blushes. You know who you are!
An eclectic work requires advice from unusual quarters. My old friend and airline pilot Paul Ambrose provided an example for the chapter on listening. Another old friend, Arnar Gudmundsson of Reykjavik provided advice on bird calls for the same chapter. I appreciate the help of the distinguished church historian Thomas McCoog, SJ, of Fordham University with the material relating to the Jesuit Order, the originators of the term “propaganda,” and of the great German artist Gunter Demnig on the international use of his stolperstein. Catalan scholar Marc Argemí Ballbè helped with Spanish folk sayings. This work has been shaped by input from students at USC and further afield. Anna Loup has been a terrific assistant. Neftalie Williams has demonstrated the power of sport diplomacy. Saltanat Kerimbayeva opened the door to Kazakhstan. Caitlin Schindler, whose Leeds University PhD I co-supervised, picked up my own phrase “foreign public engagement” as a useful alternative to public diplomacy and encouraged me to do the same. I have also benefited from being examiner on the excellent PhDs written by Alice Srugies and Molly Bettie.
I have appreciated the support of Polity Press, especially Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and Mary Savigar, and the attentive editor Gail Ferguson. The wonderful cover design by Jason Anscomb inspired by the Council of Europe’s European Day of Languages. This book was supposed to have been ready by the middle of 2016 but was overtaken by events and my diversion to practical projects in the public diplomacy field. Glad we got there in the end!
Friends in Redondo have been part of the story. So many happy working days have begun with Joel Futerer’s summons to breakfast at Classic Burger on Torrance Boulevard and I appreciate the company of Brian Kastner, Peter Kurbikoff, and Bob Reid, the co-recipients of those electronic invites. My three young sons, Alex, Magnus, and Olly, have provided a welcome distraction from the screen and gave this project meaning. They are the embodiments of the future that the best public diplomacy is working to create. My youngest son was recently challenged by a fellow eight-year-old in an exchange that is relevant to this book:
Girl: Your dad’s job is bogus. Public Diplomacy is not a real thing.
Olly: It certainly is. It has stopped a bunch of wars.
Girl: OK. Name them.
Olly: Easy. They were all called World War III.
If lawmakers around the world had Olly’s confidence, public diplomacy work would have fewer worries. My wife Karen Ford Cull has provided both emotional and intellectual support and encouragement. Finally, given the origins of so much of this work in the CPD Summer Institute, I cannot but dedicate this to my colleague and friend Eytan Gilboa with thanks and in anticipation of joint projects yet to come.
Nicholas J. Cull, Redondo Beach, California, May 2018
List of Abbreviations
ANC
African National Congress
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
CBI
Country Brand Index
CFPNI
Children’s Friendship Project for Northern Ireland
CVE
countering violent extremism
ERASMUS
European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students
EU
European Union
EUNIC
European Union National Institutes of Culture
FBIS
Foreign Broadcast Information Service
FCO
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FIFA
Fédération Internationale de Football Association
INF
intermediate nuclear forces
IRI
Office of Research and Intelligence
IVLP
International Visitor Leader Program
LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NBI
Nation Brand Index
NGO
nongovernmental organization
OSCE
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
PEGIDA
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West
PEPFAR
President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief
RFE/RL
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
RIAS
Radio in the American Sector
RT
Russia Today
UNESCO
United National Economic Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNICEF
United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
USIA
United States Information Agency
VOA
Voice of America
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol
YALI
Young African Leaders Initiative
1Diplomacy through Foreign Public Engagement: Core Terminology and History
The small town of Muscatine, Iowa, USA is not one of the world’s great crossroads. With a population of 20,000, its only claim to fame was being the “Watermelon Capital of the World.” On the afternoon of February 12, 2012, however, the town was crowded. There were local well-wishers, international students in from Iowa City, police, camera crews, and protestors too. Spectators waved flags of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and some carried homemade signs with slogans like “Iowa ❤ China.” At the appointed hour, the motorcade arrived. The guest of honor – Xi Jinping, then still China’s vice-president – made his way to a modest clapboarded home at 2911 Bonnie Drive. As cameras flashed, he greeted a row of civic dignitaries and an elderly couple – Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak – who had flown in from Florida just for the meeting. This was not Mr Xi’s first visit to Muscatine nor his first meeting with the Dvorchaks. More than thirty years previously, in 1985, they had welcomed him to their home when he was part of a touring delegation of Chinese officials seeking to learn about life in the United States. China’s future president slept a couple of nights in their son’s old room surrounded by American football-themed wallpaper and Star Wars action figures. Returning in 2012, Xi Jinping spoke warmly of his happy memories of Muscatine, the Dvorchaks, and the positive view of ordinary American people that he had formed.1
The original event in 1985 and its commemoration in 2012 only happened because people in power in Beijing and in Washington, DC understood that international relations are not solely a matter of government-to-government contact. Sometimes the best way to conduct foreign policy is for a government to engage a foreign public or, indeed, for foreign publics to engage one another directly. These kinds of activity are known in the United States as public diplomacy. For some observers, public diplomacy is simply a variety of propaganda; however, practitioners and scholars have learned to see the two as distinct. Propaganda is about dictating your message to an audience and persuading them you are right. Public diplomacy is about listening to the other side and working to develop a relationship of mutual understanding.
Terminology
There is no universally agreed vocabulary for the business of conducting foreign policy by engaging global publics. Israelis speak of “explaining” (hasbará); the current French term is “influence diplomacy” (diplomatie d’influence) and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office use the term “strategic communication.” Japanese officials tend to call the whole process “cultural exchange,” even if it includes neither culture nor much of any two-way exchange process. Chinese officials speak of xuānchuán, a compound word uniting the concepts of “declare” and “pass on/teach” which was adopted by the country’s communists as their translation for the western term “propaganda.” Canada at one point referred to its entire approach to the public as “advocacy.” Many smaller countries conceive of the whole process through the lens of “nation branding” or other commercial practices, such as international public relations or tourism promotion. All these terms are partial and some actively misleading. The preferred American term – “public diplomacy” – may be the least-worst term in common use.
The take-up of the term “public diplomacy” owes more to the coincidence of the need to explain the post-Cold War role of publics in foreign affairs with US preeminence than its theoretical perfection or otherwise. It has, however, achieved sufficient currency in the West to have been adopted within many bureaucracies beyond the United States, not only as the title for sections of foreign ministries and professional specializations but also by academics. As Eytan Gilboa has pointed out, while many scholars have examined public diplomacy, there is no overarching theory, but rather contributions from multiple disciplines. History, international relations, and communication have been especially significant, and scholars of psychology and public relations have been part of the discourse as well.2 The term “public diplomacy” accordingly has found its way into the titles of articles, books, journals, academic organizations, professorial titles, and even one or two master’s degree programs.3
None of these terms comes without baggage; each carries within it a metaphor which consciously or unconsciously shapes the work and often represents its goal or claim to legitimacy. “Strategic communication” evokes the military realm and seems well chosen to please those who hold the purse strings and who understand the world in security terms above all else. “Cultural exchange” speaks of benign artistically focused conversations: ballet tours and biennales of art. “Diplomacy of influence” suggests an ability to manipulate an audience, summoning perhaps the mental picture of an extravagantly mustachioed stage hypnotist flourishing his hands to extend his magnétisme animal. “Nation branding” conjures up the realm of the urban creative professional with slick sales pitch, sample logos, and an open-plan office. “Public diplomacy” also paints its own picture. It courts an image of a seasoned foreign affairs professional – the diplomat – communicating for the ends of the state. The term “public diplomacy” is influential not only because of the ability of the United States to export its ways of thinking; there is also a special value in a term for foreign public engagement which locates the practice in the realm of civilian international relations. The world of diplomacy is better than the business world of state public relations, let alone the covert and manipulative realm which English speakers understand from the term “propaganda.” The term “public diplomacy” is helpful insomuch as it places the engagement process as a form of diplomacy, which is to say, one of the ways in which an international actor seeks to manage the international environment.4
The components of foreign public engagement
While the term “public diplomacy” is fairly new, wise rulers have always known the importance of public opinion and the value of avoiding the counterproductive currents that attend acts of violence, even for winners. Two-and-half millennia ago, a Greek thinker named Bias led the small democracy of Priene in Ionia on the coast of what is now Turkey. He had a reputation as a skilled advocate and in time would be famed as the wisest of the Seven Sages of Greece. His advice to fellows was unequivocal: “gain your point by persuasion, not by force.” 5 Making the same point through fable, Bias’s contemporary Aesop told the story of the bet between the North Wind and the sun over who could remove a certain traveler’s cloak. The North Wind blew and merely caused the traveler to draw his clothing closer, but a few minutes of sunshine soon saw him remove his cloak. Warmth had won. Part of the story is the understanding of the dynamics that Joseph Nye dubbed soft power: that wise policies, attractive culture, and admirable character bring foreign policy benefits. In ancient China, Confucius spoke of wise emperors “attracting by virtue,” noting “it is for this reason that, when distant subjects are not submissive, one cultivates one’s moral quality in order to attract them.” A reputation for wisdom bolstered the rule of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century and of the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne in eighth-century Europe. The thirteenth-century Islamic leader Saladin was admired even by his enemies: feared in war but trusted in peace. Kings of France from the 1500s onward proclaimed themselves roi très chrétien (very Christian king) and understood that such a reputation helped them do business everywhere in the world, including with nonbelievers. But there was more at work than just appreciating the value of persuasion and developing a reputation for admirable policy. Historically, there are five distinct ways in which international actors have engaged foreign publics: listening; advocacy; cultural diplomacy; exchange diplomacy; and news/international broadcasting.
Listening
The foundational form of foreign policy through public engagement is listening. Listening is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by collecting and analyzing data about international publics and using that data to redirect its policy or its communication accordingly. In its most basic form this covers an event whereby an international actor seeks out a foreign audience and engages them by listening rather than by speaking. While systematic assessments of foreign opinion are modern, estimating a neighbor’s morale has long been a goal of statecraft, most especially in time of war. Writing some half-millennium before the Common Era, the Chinese sage Sun Tzu observed: “What is called ‘foreknowledge’ cannot be elicited from spirits or from gods, or by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.”6 In our own time, listening is conducted through all manner of contact with publics including opinion research, open-source media study, and many, many conversations between diplomats and members of the public.
Advocacy
Advocacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by presenting a particular policy, idea, or the actor’s general interests to a foreign public. Ancient examples include Xerxes of Persia, who, according to Herodotus, used envoys to successfully appeal to people of Argos for their neutrality during the empire’s invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. The Persians stressed kinship between the Argives and Persians through shared descent from the hero Perseus.7 In modern times, advocacy includes the set-piece communication campaigns (including the social media), embassy press relations, and informational work. The obvious relevance of advocacy to policy has made it an especial priority for the masters of foreign policy and it has often been given a privileged position at the center of any overall engagement structure.
Cultural diplomacy
Cultural diplomacy may be defined as an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment through facilitating the export of an element of that actor’s life, belief or art. Ancient examples include the Greek construction of the great library at Alexandria in the third century BCE or the Byzantine emperors Michael III and Basil I, who sponsored Orthodox Christian evangelism across the Slavic lands in the 860s, understanding that the work of missionaries like St Cyril and St Methodius carried with it imperial influence. The investment created an extensive Orthodox cultural zone which allowed Byzantium to punch above its weight for several centuries and which still exerts a pull on the peoples whose common writing system is named for St Cyril: Cyrillic.8 Modern examples of cultural diplomacy have included the world tours of the Bolshoi ballet sponsored by the Soviet government during the Cold War or the US government’s analogous sponsorship of visits from jazz musicians, or the work of Britain’s agency for cultural relations with foreign publics: the British Council.
Exchange diplomacy
Exchange diplomacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by sending its citizens overseas and reciprocally accepting citizens from overseas for a period of study and/or acculturation. Here the classic ancient examples are the child exchanges practiced for centuries by the Celts and other archaic peoples which seem to have played a key role in diffusing cultural practices and stability within their cultural regions.9 Today, exchanges are a major tool of international engagement and a particular priority of the United States, which supports exchange beyond most other elements of public diplomacy.
International broadcasting
While advocacy is based on extending an argument, there is a parallel tradition of engaging a foreign public not by arguing but by presenting (or claiming to present) an objective picture of the world at large. In the twentieth century, this was done through the international broadcasting of news but the pre-electronic era had its equivalents. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194‒1250) regularly wrote and distributed letters to neighboring courts. These letters related world events, such as the Sixth Crusade, his wish for what would now be termed a “Middle East peace process,” and his ongoing quarrel with the Pope, who preferred victory to peace.10 The advent of electronic media has made it possible for an international actor to transmit news across frontiers instantly. While from its outset advocacy, culture, and exchange elements were a part of international broadcasting, it was the news content that made the medium special. International news broadcasting was part of the Allied victory in World War II, the waging of the Cold War, and the management of the transition to a global society. Whether transmitted via radio, television, or as content for a handheld device, news is a vital part of public diplomacy.
Divergences and interrelationships
These five elements may share a common objective but they are separated by important differences. Consider first the direction in which the information is flowing: in listening, the information flows from the public to the actor; in advocacy, from the actor to the public; in cultural work, the flow is from the sources of the actor’s culture and the public; in exchanges, it is a two-way flow between selected individuals or wider publics. In international broadcasting, the characteristic flow is between a news bureaucracy and the public.
Second, consider the source of credibility for each element: The credibility of listening comes from the perceived responsiveness of the listener to what is heard. The credibility of advocacy is based on the proximity of the advocate to the actor’s policy. The credibility of cultural diplomacy is based on cultural factors – the authenticity or representativeness of a cultural form or practice shown. The credibility of exchange is based on a perception of mutuality. The credibility of international broadcasting is based on its compliance with the professional standards of journalism.
Third, consider the timescale in which these activities are expected to work. Listening is part of a continuous process. Advocacy has a short cycle, timed to immediate policy objectives. Cultural diplomacy has a medium-term horizon, while exchange diplomacy looks to the longer term. International broadcasting works over a long time frame but is also expected to respond to a crisis. These disparate qualities mean that elements are ill-suited to being housed too closely together and may even be mutually antithetical.
Figure 1.1 The Canadian public diplomacy pyramid. Author, after Foreign Affairs Canada, 2005.
The task-specific logic and centrifugal pressures on each element of engagement are sufficiently strong that many countries use specialist agencies for most or even all of these functions. They look to open-source intelligence and think tanks for listening; communication units within the foreign ministry for advocacy; freestanding cultural agencies for culture; exchange agencies for exchange; and an independent broadcasting organization like the BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle for broadcasting. The US term “public diplomacy” could have been simply an umbrella set over these activities but became something more: an argument for a centralized approach.11 Practitioners should be aware that a unitary term does not necessarily require a unitary bureaucracy to deliver it.
Bureaucracies around the world have attempted to conceptualize the interrelationships between these elements of engagement. For some, the key has been to assert their need for a fire wall. Britain’s British Council and Germany’s Goethe Institute insist on independence from the policy makers. The Council even rejects the term “cultural diplomacy” in favor of the words “cultural relations” to stress its distance from an immediate policy agenda and the one-way communication dynamic that it implies. Similarly, western international broadcasters demand full editorial independence. The differences were helpfully sketched in 2005 by a team from the Canadian foreign ministry who devised what they termed the “Public Diplomacy Pyramid.”
The pyramid locates advocacy at the summit as a short-term activity, closely controlled by the government. In the middle is profile-raising work, which corresponds to most cultural diplomacy, taking place in the medium term and with a moderate level of government oversight. The base of the pyramid is provided by relationship building: the kind of work typified by exchange diplomacy which requires a long timescale and over which the international actor can exercise little control. Most exchanges ultimately become a process of turning the people loose and hoping for the best. The “public diplomacy pyramid” is in some ways aspirational. While it would be nice to conceptualize exchanges as the broad and well-resourced foundation of the whole structure of global engagement, it is often not the case. Ironically, one of the most outrageous cases of divergence from this model was that of Canada itself under Prime Minister Stephen Harper who focused only on advocacy with detrimental results for Canada’s image.12
Propaganda
It is impossible to understand the role of public engagement in foreign policy without paying attention to the history of propaganda. Comparing the two is rather like comparing a crystal clear mountain stream to a vast and churning ocean. Both are water, and hence from one perspective, the same thing, yet their natures are profoundly different. One – public diplomacy ‒ is pure and life sustaining, the other – propaganda ‒ is powerful, untameable, and should not be drunk. One is hard to find, the other is ubiquitous. Yet the two are joined. As the river rolls to the sea, so public diplomacy always tumbles downhill toward propaganda. The study of propaganda is an essential element in understanding the context of public diplomacy, and practitioners of public diplomacy must have a clear sense of what propaganda is in order to avoid slipping into it.
The history of propaganda in foreign policy
Propaganda is not a moment in the history of international relations. It is an element in the structure of international relations.13 It began with war. Humans have always understood that cultural factors can act as a force multiplier in combat. From the earliest times, warriors have enhanced their appearance with war paint and sought to boost their own confidence and blunt that of the enemy with drums and trumpets and stories of their heroism or ruthlessness. Tricks are part of the story. Bias of Priene – the Greek sage who claimed that it was better to win by argument than force – was perfectly prepared to resort to deception when required. When the Lydian king Alyattes besieged Priene – busy amassing the fortune that would make his son Croesus a byword for wealth – Bias arranged for two specially fattened mules to be released into the enemy camp. Amazed that the city had sufficient reserves to keep its livestock so well, Alyattes sued for peace. When his ambassador arrived in the city, Bias ordered that he be shown sacks of grain (in reality sand with a layer of grain on the top) and, to complete the ruse of self-confidence, when Alyattes demanded that Bias come quickly to his camp to conclude the terms of the Lydian departure, the thinker sent the defiant message “go eat onions” and left the king to stew until he was ready to conclude their business.14 Four centuries before the Common Era, the Indian sage Kautilya placed great emphasis on psychological warfare. His manual on statecraft, Arthashastra, includes long passages with suggestions for what might be termed “messing with the heads” of the enemy and one’s own military too, including the employment of bards and soothsayers to depress the enemy and build up the home team:
Soothsayers and court bards should describe heaven as the goal for the brave and hell for the timid; and also extol the caste, corporation, family, deeds, and character of his men. The followers of the priest should proclaim the auspicious aspects of the witchcraft performed. Spies, carpenters and astrologers should also declare the success of their own operations and the failure of those of the enemy.15
As ancient states took shape, rulers learned to use the symbols of their state and of themselves to enhance their ability to project power. No one did this better than Alexander the Great, whose authorized portrait – chiseled into busts, laid into mosaic, and stamped on coins from Greece to the Hindu Kush – was carefully crafted and circulated to enhance his reach. As portrayed, he was a man but his shaggy hair communicated the power of a lion and his raised chin and eyes fixed beyond the horizon made a visual claim to his being a god. Man/lion/god, he was not lightly to be defied. As the centuries rolled by, the techniques of enhancement became more sophisticated but the overall objective remained much the same. Image was an essential element of power.16
The next major phase in the evolution of propaganda came as Europe lurched into its first communications revolution and its concurrent era of religious competition: the Reformation. As the Roman Catholic Church struggled to hold its ground in Europe and win new souls abroad, a former soldier saw the way forward. Ignatius of Loyola, a warrior-turned-priest from Spain’s Basque country, understood that the same kind of systematization that an effective commander brought to a military campaign could be applied to the task of communicating religion. In 1539, he drew up a plan to create a new holy order which he named “the Society of Jesus,” or the Jesuits. Its foundational document – the Formula of the Institute – defined its purpose as for the “defense and propagation of the faith” (propagandafide in Latin) and “for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine by means of public preaching, lectures, and any other ministration …” Pope Paul III approved the document in September 1540.17 As the Jesuits deployed a range of techniques for communicating their faith – including recovering classical approaches to rhetoric – the words propaganda fide began their journey into the church’s vocabulary and the lexicon of the world.18
In the 1570s, Pope Gregory XIII, best known for his calendar reform, founded a string of colleges and schools including a committee of three cardinals, known as the Cardinals’ Commission for Propagation of the Faith, to coordinate missionary activity. The full institutionalization of the term and the process of propaganda came in 1622 when Pope Gregory XV founded a substantial bureaucracy known as the Sacred Congregation for Propagation of the Faith in Rome as a permanent institutional home for the counter-reformation process. He also made Ignatius a saint. With a generation of Jesuits trained in its arts and its own palazzo in the middle of Rome at one end of the Piazza di Spagna (just turn left at the bottom of the Spanish Steps), the term “propaganda” was here to stay. The term entered wider usage and, for Northern European Protestant writers, thanks to its Catholic origins “propaganda” soon had the taint of totalitarian excess.19
The religious changes in Europe prompted the next phase. As Protestant states threw off their old allegiances and embraced revolution, they also began the task of explaining their new systems of government to their neighbors across Europe whose trade they needed and whose friendship and understanding they valued. Campaigns included that undertaken by Prince William the Silent of the United Provinces of the Netherlands to justify his nation’s revolt against Spain. In 1580, William himself sent a defiant Apologie to Philip II explaining his actions in terms of universal principles of liberty and denouncing Spanish atrocities at home and abroad. The document, actually written by William’s chaplain, was published in French, Dutch, English, German, and Latin and clearly sought an audience far beyond the Spanish court, which in any case refused to recognize the independence of the Netherlands until 1648.20 In a similar vein, following the overthrow and execution of England’s Charles I in 1649, the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell took care to explain this and other actions overseas. Cromwell appointed the poet John Milton as Latin secretary to the Council of State (or “Secretary of Foreign Tongues”). Milton’s Latin arguments on behalf of Cromwell’s government were widely read in Europe.21 Perhaps the most successful international outreach by a revolutionary government came in 1776 when revolutionaries in Britain’s American colonies issued their Declaration of Independence to “let the facts be submitted to a candid world.”22
The democratization that flowed from the new political ideas and systems brought ordinary people into the foreign policy process. Governments began tracking and even reaching out to foreign electorates. In 1793, the French Revolutionary diplomat “Citizen” Edmond Charles Genêt outraged the neutral United States by organizing Jacobin clubs to promote the revolutionary cause.23 Countries launching propaganda campaigns in the nineteenth century included both Mexico and the Ottoman Empire. Mexican presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz both worked to win US opinion; envoys included the pioneer of Mexican diplomacy Matías Romero. Around the same time, the Ottoman Sultan Abdül Hamid II tried various gambits to improve the image of his empire. As Selim Deringel has related, his strategies included the positive (presenting photographic collections to major western libraries) and the negative (applying diplomatic pressure to try to change overly exotic representations of his country in popular culture). Dutch skits set in harems were a particular irritant. When all else failed, his agents simply bribed western journalists to give the empire a good press.24
The final element in the emergence of propaganda as a dimension of foreign policy was the coming of an era of total war driven by the convergence of democratization and the industrialization of the military. The combatant powers needed to secure their own population’s service in armies, navies, and munitions plants to draw neutrals to their side and to break their enemy’s “will to resist.” World War I saw the tactics in full flood. The Italians pioneered the airdropping of leaflets. The French private sector blended religion and patriotism. The British demonized the enemy as the perpetrators of horrific atrocities before switching to a more idealistic approach, promising – in concert with the US president Woodrow Wilson – a better world for ally and enemy alike.25
By the mid-twentieth century, all these drivers of propaganda were in play in the person of Joseph Stalin and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s regime understood the psychological factor in war initiating a complex mix of gambits including disinformation campaigns to misdirect and confuse the enemy. They understood image, seeking to export Stalin’s cult of personality. It worked to propagate its communist ideology in much the same way as a religion and to explain its revolution as vigorously as any previous regime. Democratization presented opportunities. Its early post-war victories came through elections in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Italy came perilously close to falling to communism in an election in 1948. The decolonization process promised to open new territory for communism. The logic of total war, with its emphasis on the role of ordinary people, remained. The world had never seen a country or a campaign like it. It pushed the United States to respond.
The emergence of US public diplomacy
Although American actors and institutions had for many years worked to spread their country’s ideas around the world, as of 1945 the US government had tended to see its sponsorship of information work as a tool only for crises. This led to a kind of “hokey cokey/hokey pokey” dance in which the country variously put its “whole self” into foreign public engagement during the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, but then hurried to pull its “whole self” out of such activity when the danger passed. By 1948, the scale of the Cold War challenge convinced a majority on Capitol Hill that once again the time had come to act. They moved to provide funding for a range of outreach activities both overt and covert. The country’s early efforts were an alphabet soup of programs. Congress variously reinvigorated pre-war work like the educational exchanges with Latin America; extended the life of wartime operations like Voice of America (VOA) radio or the embassy-based United States Information Service posts; and adapted post-war initiatives like the re-education work in Germany and Japan or communication aspects of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. The result was administrative chaos. Seeking a coherent response, in 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower pulled most of the existing overt programs together and created a single integrated United States Information Agency (USIA).26 Initially, this new agency was happy enough to refer to its work as information or exchange, but a decade into its existence the United States Information Agency needed a new banner term under which to campaign for funding. The answer was the term “public diplomacy.”
The term “public diplomacy” was the creature, if not quite the creation, of an ex-diplomat turned dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Edmund Gullion. Gullion’s initial object in devising a term was to create a democratic equivalent to the word “propaganda.” He explained in 1967: “I would have liked to call it ‘propaganda.’ It seemed the nearest thing in the pure interpretation of the word to what we were doing. But ‘propaganda’ has always had a pejorative connotation in this country. To describe the whole range of communications, information and propaganda, we hit upon ‘public diplomacy.’”27 The USIA was happy to embrace the term. The term was like a map which showed a beleaguered country’s right to retain a wayward province (read Voice of America) and extend control over a sliver of a neighbor’s territory (read the State Department’s cultural program). It promised to be one term to rule them all. The term “public diplomacy” also played to the professional aspirations of the Agency’s staff. Now they could be diplomats rather than a variety of public relations men and women. Within a year or so of its arrival, they went from being second-class citizens – quite literally as members of the Foreign Service Reserve – to full Foreign Service Officers with enhanced pension rights and promotion prospects that extended all the way up to the rank of ambassador. Whatever the impact of public diplomacy overseas, the term made an immense contribution to its practitioners’ battles for recognition at home.28
Public diplomacy versus propaganda
Despite the origins of the term as a euphemism, it was not long before practitioners began looking on public diplomacy as something qualitatively different from propaganda. They worked to make public diplomacy a different kind of practice. This was not wholly surprising. As the historian Frank Ninkovich has documented, the State Department’s pre-war foray into public engagement was driven by a vision of mutual knowledge between peoples, not a crude extension of power.29 The two-way vision was repressed in World War II and struggled to return in the Cold War. The United Kingdom saw a similar rebellion as the British Council rejected the term propaganda in favor of its own benign language of cultural relations.30
It is possible to tease public diplomacy and propaganda apart and contrast the two:
public diplomacy is based on truth but propaganda selects truth;
public diplomacy is often two-way but propaganda is seldom two-way;
public diplomacy listens to learn but propaganda listens to target;
public diplomacy can change the sending/initiating society too but propaganda is intended only to change the target society;
public diplomacy is flexible in its approach but propaganda has a tight agenda;
public diplomacy tends to be respectful of others but propaganda assumes that others are ignorant or wrong;
public diplomacy is open-ended but propaganda is closed;
public diplomacy is ethical but propaganda’s ethics cannot be taken for granted;
Ironically, while the acceptance of the principles of an ideal public diplomacy within the US practitioner community is widespread, the political leadership in Congress and at the helm of the Department of State plainly still expect a practice much closer to propaganda. Public diplomats learn early to keep notions of conducting global engagement for its own sake to themselves and to speak a language of threats, counter-campaigns, and unilateral influence when presenting their work to their political masters. Evidence of this is hard to come by, but there are clear pointers in the survey Kathy Fitzpatrick, then of Quinnipiac University, conducted among veterans of the USIA in 2008. She found that on average they rated “defeating communism” as eleventh in their assessment of priorities in Cold War public diplomacy and “defeating terrorism” as seventh in their assessment of contemporary priorities. The prime goal was “to create understanding and support for the United States and its policies.” They also gave high priority “to establish and maintain good relationships with people abroad” and “to demonstrate respect for other cultures and values.”31
One of the clearest indications that US outreach to the world during the Cold War was understood as propaganda by Congress was their loss of interest in the subject when the Cold War came to an end. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, budgets plummeted and programs were cut. In the end, in 1999 the United States Information Agency was merged into the Department of State, and America’s capacity to engage the global public reached a low point.32 Ironically at the precise moment US public diplomacy foundered, the concept was riding high elsewhere in the world. The rise of the network society inspired many international actors to upgrade their international engagement. The surge of interest not merely in outreach of governments-to-people but of people-to-people links led scholars like Rhonda Zaharna, Ali Fisher, and Amelia Arsenault to explore the importance of a public diplomacy built on relationships, and others, such as Jan Melissen and James Pamment, to examine the new public diplomacy.33
The terrain of the new public diplomacy
Surveying the world today, there are multiple factors that set it apart from that of the previous generation. The old world was dominated by the bipolar fault line of the Cold War which had such overarching importance as to overshadow and color all other stories such as decolonization, regional integration, and so forth. Today, there are many stories competing for public attention and many sources for those stories, not simply a handful of governments and their associated centralized media machines. A generation ago, international relations was largely a monopoly of the nation-state. Today, international action and communication rests not only with nation-states but with a bewildering array of actors including international organizations, regional groupings, nongovernmental organizations (both genuine and fake), corporations, subnational governments like provinces, and networks of individuals who wish to be connected to one another because of shared ideas.34 In fact, by 2015 a non-state network –ISIS/Daesh ‒ had established itself in US government rhetoric as the principal threat to its national security. All players on the international stage have a story and seek to advance their interests by telling it.
The new world has its new mechanisms of communication. The communication satellite and the World Wide Web together brought a simultaneous speeding up and diffusion of communication. In ancient times, the biblical notion of “all flesh” seeing an event “together” was the ultimate miracle.35 Today it is routine. The trick is not to create the hardware for such a convergence of attention but to imagine something compelling enough to attract it. The direction of communication has changed. In the old world, messages flowed from the top down, emanating from a limited number of bureaucracies and media institutions. In the new world, messages are passed horizontally across networks of peers. We live, as the sociologist Manuel Castells has put, it in a “network society.”36
The new world is characterized by an erosion of many barriers and boundaries. The forces of economic and cultural globalization have created markets, corporations, and conversations which transcend any one location. This has had profound implications for government communicators. It is no longer possible to have one story for a home audience and one for foreign listeners. Today, words spoken in Kansas are heard in Kandahar. This change has caught out politicians who have spoken hastily without thought for a foreign audience, as when President George W. Bush proposed a “crusade” against terrorists following the attacks of 9/11.37 It has also altered the nature of many nations’ approach to international communication. Where a generation ago a diplomat abroad might have had freedom to engage as they saw fit, today they can find themselves tightly constrained by regulations and requirements to maintain “message discipline.” Words are spoken by diplomats in Kandahar because of concerns over how voters in Kansas might react.38
