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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We are living in turbulent times, witnessing renewed international conflict, resurgent nationalism, declining multilateralism, and a torrent of hostile propaganda. How are we to understand these developments and conduct diplomacy in their presence? Nicholas J. Cull, the distinguished historian of propaganda, revisits the international media campaigns of the past in the light of the challenges of the present. His concept of Reputational Security deftly links issues of national image and outreach to the deepest needs of any state, rescuing them from the list of low-priority optional extras to which they are so often consigned in the West. Reputational Security, he argues, comes from being known and appreciated in the world. With clarity and determination, Cull considers core tasks, approaches, and opportunities available for international actors today, including counterpropaganda, media development, diaspora diplomacy, cultural work, and - perhaps most surprisingly of all - media disarmament. This book is crucial for all who care about responding to the threat of malign media disruption, revitalizing international cooperation, and establishing the Reputational Security we and our allies need to survive and flourish. Reputational Security is enlightening reading for students and scholars of public diplomacy, international relations, security studies, communications, and media, as well as practitioners.
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Seitenzahl: 528
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Reputational Security: Refocusing of Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
How This Book Came to Be Written
The Plan of the Book
Acknowledgments
Introduction Reputation and Soft Power: Image and Action in World Affairs
Thucydides to Thatcher: A Short History of Reputation in International Relations
The Concept and Its Moment: Soft Power in the Post-Cold War World
The Watershed: Facing Soft Power’s Limits
Conclusion
Notes
1 Reputational Security: Frame, Objective, and Agenda
Back to Basics: Reputation and Security
Policies to Build Reputational Security
Reputation in a Time of Crisis: Cases of Reputational Security and Insecurity
Reputation in the Era of Renewed Great Power Competition
Conclusion
Notes
2 Technology and Reputational Security: Historical Cases of Media Disruption and Adoption
Our Moment of Crisis
Media Disruption in Historical Perspective
Media Disruption and the Road to World War I
The Road to World War II
The Cold War
Responses
Case One: Radio
Case Two: Terrestrial Television
Case Three: Satellite Television
The Coming of the Internet
“Public Diplomacy 2.0”
Conclusion: An Agenda for Leadership
Notes
3 Pushing Back: Counterpropaganda and Reputational Security
Media Literacy as Counterpropaganda
Case: Counterpropaganda in the Interwar United States
Against Rumors in Wartime
The Cold War
US Counterpropaganda in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
Famous Victory: US Counterpropaganda in the 1980s
Lessons from the 1980s
The Post-Cold War Period
The War on Terror
Counterpropaganda in the Social Media Era
Conclusion
Notes
4 Media Development: A Tool for Reputational Security
Foundations
Media Assistance
Five Models of Historical Media Assistance
Media Assistance and Public Diplomacy Today
The Good News Story: Armenia 2018
Conclusion
Notes
5 Information Disarmament: A Forgotten Element of Reputational Security
Varieties of Disarmament
Cold War Propaganda
Cultural Negotiation in the Midst of Cold War
Cold War Peace Initiatives
Détente and the US–USSR Textbook Study Project
Launching Spacebridges
Launching Chautauqua
Geneva, November 1985
Moscow, January 1986
Exchanges Recommence
October 1986, Reykjavik
Confronting Disinformation, April 1987
December 1987, Washington, DC
First Bilateral Meeting on Information, April 1988
Second Bilateral Meeting on Information, September 1988
Third Bilateral Meeting on Information, February 1990
Legacy in 1990s
Conclusion
Notes
6 Diaspora Diplomacy: From History to Reputational Security
Diasporas in International History
Communication and the Matrix of Diaspora Diplomacy
Diasporas and the Matrix of Public Diplomacy
Diasporas and Contemporary Soft Power
Diasporas in the Age of Reputational Security
Conclusion
Notes
7 Cultural Diplomacy, Cultural Relations, and Reputational Security
Culture as a Foundation of Reputational Security
Taiwanese Cultural Diplomacy at the Quest for Reputational Security
Domestic Cultural Policy and Reputational Security
Cultural Relations and Reputational Security
Conclusion
Notes
8 Rethinking US Public Diplomacy: The Apparatus of Reputational Security
Historical Foundations
Public Diplomacy and Reputational Security
Broader Policy and Reputational Security
Coordination and Leadership
The Next Frontier: Collective Reputational Security
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion The Reckoning: Reputational Security and Russia’s War in Ukraine
Reputational Security
Media Disruption and Adoption
Counterpropaganda
Media Assistance
Media Disarmament
Diasporas
Cultural Diplomacy
US Public Diplomacy
The Limits of Reputational Security
The Way Ahead
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1
The basic concept of Reputational Security (RS)
Figure 2
Chart to summarize the difference between Soft Power and Reputational Security as …
Figure 3
Diagram of relationship between Reputational Security (RS), Soft Power work and do…
Figure 4
British opinion toward Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1938–1939
Figure 5
British Reputational Security and US public opinion, 1939–1942
Figure 6
Comparative Reputational Security (RS) of Afghanistan and Mali, 1995–2012
Conclusion
Figure 7
International reputation of Ukraine, 2014–2023
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction Reputation and Soft Power: Image and Action in World Affairs
Begin Reading
Conclusions The Reckoning: Reputational Security and Russia’s War in Ukraine
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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For Simon Anholt
Reputational Security
Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World
Nicholas J. Cull
polity
Copyright © Nicholas J. Cull 2024
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 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, 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: 978-1-5095-5927-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937135
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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Preface
Our world changed on 24 February 2022 when Russian armed forces began their all-out invasion of Ukraine. The spectacle of a land war in Europe on a scale not seen since World War II underlined the extent to which international affairs had fallen back into the realm of intense global competition. But even without the outbreak of a shooting war, the outlines of a new global landscape were already clear. The COVID-19 pandemic could have been a textbook opportunity for cooperation and collective effort. It did not play out that way. Rather, the pandemic was dominated by hostile messages as certain countries looked to associate their adversaries with the calamity, to talk up their own successful responses and denigrate the efforts of others. Some commentators have spoken of a return to the Cold War, and many argue that attitudes and strategies from that period are relevant once again. Yet there is much new about the world in which we find ourselves. One of the big changes would seem to be the role of mass media and the central role of reputation in contemporary international relations, sharpened by the role of digital social media. Of course, the Cold War was also a media struggle – a contest for the imagination of the world played between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc – but it was a two-player game played at analog speed. Today there are more players, and the volumes of data being shared dwarf the flows of information that characterized the Cold War. How are we to understand this world and conduct diplomacy within it? This book provides pointers.
Reputational Security: Refocusing of Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
In 2019, I published an overview of one of the most significant but underappreciated tools of contemporary statecraft: Public Diplomacy. I argued that an understanding of the processes and approaches by which international actors can conduct foreign policy through global public engagement is a necessary foundation for success. I also argued that the history of work in this area provided an important roadmap for progress, whether we communicate with electronic tweets or quill, pen, and ink. I explained the difference between the generally two-way activity of Public Diplomacy and one-way focused propaganda. I discussed five core elements: listening (which I consider to be the most important and foundational activity), advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy, and international broadcasting. I presented the practice of nation branding as a misstep in Public Diplomacy as it obstructed the key approach of contemporary international relations: partnership. In my conclusion to that book, I argued that the dominant frame used to understand the role of image in international relations – Joseph Nye’s term Soft Power (the ability of states to do more on the international stage if their values, policies, and culture are admired) – had been seriously diluted by the range of practice around the world and, moreover, was a poor fit for an era of renewed great power conflict. I argued that it was time to adopt a revised terminology that more explicitly reflects the damage that could come to states whose image has slipped. I proposed Reputational Security as a suitable frame. The present book is an opportunity to pick up where I left off and provide a more detailed exploration of what I mean by the term Reputational Security and to apply it to the challenges that have emerged since I completed that text in 2018.
As with the previous volume, this book is first and foremost the work of a historian. While I draw on other disciplines, including those of international relations and communication studies, history is the thread that holds the argument together. Readers will note that I tend to revert to US history, and some chapters are told almost entirely from the point of view of the US experience. My treatment of mechanisms available for Reputational Security (chapter 8) deals only with the US. I hope non-US readers will find relevant and applicable insights in these chapters and find them more readily than by reading my detailed histories of US Public Diplomacy, which loom large in the footnotes. The self-citation reflects the extent to which this book is not just a work of the four years since 2019 but a synthesis of ideas that I have been working with across nearly forty years of study and research into issues of reputation and communication in international history.
I do not intend this book and its terminology as a replacement for Soft Power or as some patricidal swipe at its creator and our field’s most distinguished scholar. I see it as an alternate way to think about the same processes and one I hope will resonate differently with core audiences in very different international circumstances to those in which Soft Power was coined.
How This Book Came to Be Written
This book has its roots in discomfort. While the concept of Soft Power had carried my own thinking about issues of reputation a great distance forward, I began to notice a mismatch between the term Soft Power as understood by practitioners of Public Diplomacy and the world as I knew it. The term did not quite fit either with my observations of the past as a historian or my experience of the present as an analyst and sometime consultant on issues of Public Diplomacy. I felt that a core concept of the kind that Soft Power had become should have some ability to describe experiences in all times or all places. The experience of Ukraine in 2014 was instructive. I had visited briefly in 2008 and noticed an absence of a clear narrative of what the country was for. Ukraine’s experience in 2014 – losing territory without sparking outrage among the general citizenry of the West – seemed like a clear case of what could befall a state whose national narrative was unclear or even unknown to the global community. Ukraine in 2014 seemed burdened by a specific lack quite beyond the presence of invaders and their local sympathizers.
My alternative frame of Reputational Security came to me in a moment of clarity in the summer of 2017 during a series of conversations with foreign policy practitioners in Kazakhstan. As I remember it, we were sitting in a Starbucks in the city then known as Astana. My interlocutor – Anuar Ayazbekov, director of Kazakhstan’s Institute of Diplomacy – explained that “building Soft Power” just did not describe his country’s mindset or the stakes as Kazakhstan sought to engage the outside world. I offered Reputational Security as an alternative way to pull together the threads of concern he had expressed: a way to encapsulate his belief that part of security comes from being known and appreciated in the world and that countries that are largely unknown by the outside world but are burdened with hungry neighbors can lose provinces. Ayazbekov went so far as to say that the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen had done Kazakhstan a favor by inventing his hapless Kazakh alter ego Borat Sagdiyev and making the country the butt of jokes. Global audiences now knew one thing about Kazakhstan and even if it was untrue, it was one more thing than they knew about Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan. The inaccuracy of Borat was a foundation on which further accurate knowledge could be built. The seed of Reputational Security had been planted. I kept the term in mind and began to routinely pitch it to other practitioners I met, most especially during a research trip to the Western Balkans that autumn. Officials in Kosovo recognized their own dilemma in the concept and saw it as fitting their own journey along a pathway to recognition and safety. Reputational Security also seemed to fit a world in which elements of individual nations’ lives and, indeed, the values of entire regions were being actively targeted by malign media. The experience fitted the experience described by senior communication officials from Nordic countries as they described their region becoming the target of a sustained Russian media narrative linking Scandinavia to the abuse of children and animals.
As the world veered away from collaboration and sunk deeper into a mire of conflict, resurgent nationalism, Reputational Security seemed all the more important. Recent years have only served to point up the need to attend both to Reputational Security as a whole and to the particular tools and approaches that should necessarily figure in any strategy to develop a comprehensive Reputational Security strategy. This book draws those lessons together. I look to history as a key source for strategies and answers. This book benefits from my direct contact with public diplomats around the world, past and present, including diplomats and communicators working in and around Ukraine, China, and other key locations.
The Plan of the Book
This introduction provides an overview of the development of reputation in international relations and the specific career of Soft Power from its coining around 1990 to its apparent crisis in 2015 and since. I argue, for example, that Soft Power has come to be seen as an optional extra for the top-tier countries, whereas Reputational Security links the realm of image and foreign public engagement with the most significant responsibility of statecraft: national defense. The first chapter presents the concept of Reputational Security and explains the policy priorities necessary to ensure its development and maintenance. It also explains the benefits of Reputational Security. I contend that Reputational Security can insulate a well-known or well-liked place from attack and, if disaster strikes, rally international support that would not be available to less well regarded places. I argue that Reputational Security is not only about projecting positive aspects of a nation’s culture, values, and policies but also requires an effort to reduce or even eliminate negative aspects of culture, values, and policies as well.
Chapter 2 considers why Reputational Security is a special concern in the third decade of the twenty-first century and looks specifically at reputational challenges linked to the coming of new technology. The chapter seeks to demystify our present information crisis by exploring the notion of media disruption and pointing out the parallels with previous intersections of transitions to new media and international crisis, including the runup to the First and Second World Wars and the early years of the Cold War. It presents a three-stage model for the adoption of new technology within Public Diplomacy and emphasizes the delay in adequately bringing digital diplomacy to the fore.
With the landscape and frame established, the next three chapters consider contrasting mechanisms for responding to challenges to Reputational Security. Chapter 3 reconsiders the concept of counterpropaganda, including cases from the past that provide important insights into how hostile disinformation may be rebutted. Chapter 4 addresses the challenge of propaganda in a different way by introducing the field of media assistance as an element of Reputational Security work. Chapter 5 considers yet another mechanism for responding to hostile propaganda – the forgotten process of information disarmament – and presents the case of successful US–Soviet media disarmament in the 1980s.
The closing chapters examine responses to broader issues of reputational security. Chapter 6 considers the emergence of diaspora diplomacy and its special relevance to issues of reputation. Chapter 7 looks at the implications of Reputational Security for approaches to cultural diplomacy and cultural relations. Chapter 8 considers how the US specifically might develop its Public Diplomacy apparatus to better serve the needs of Reputational Security. It also addresses a further (and for our purposes final) flaw in the frame of Soft Power. Soft Power has focused on single actors and their reputation, but the most important battles of our age are fought collectively. The world needs to consider the collective reputation of entire ways of life such as parliamentary democracy, in which the flaw of one can damage the reputation of all. The implication is that it is not enough to consider one’s own Reputational Security. Rather, there is a need to embrace a further extension of the concept – collective Reputational Security – by which allies assist one another in building resilience and, where necessary, providing the kind of critiques of genuine shortcomings necessary to remove the most damaging avenues for attack by malign forces.
The book’s conclusion takes the war in Ukraine as a case and shows how its events, and most especially the differences between 2014 and 2022, bear out the ideas underpinning Reputational Security. I rest my case that communication and protection of image are no longer a luxury but must be considered a priority for defense. Reputational Security points to the importance of collaborating with and empowering others, and working to ensure that real issues that endanger a reputation – including human rights – are addressed both by international actors and their allies.
Acknowledgments
Like its predecessor, Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (Polity, 2019), this book had an extended gestation with many pieces evolving independently as conference presentations or commissions for anthologies or both. I accepted projects specifically to allow me room to explore the concept of Reputational Security and its defense. Most of these chapters were written during the COVID-19 lockdown, which also underlined the significance of many of its core observations. The invasion of Ukraine added urgency to completion and prompted publication sooner than I might otherwise have wished so that the ideas could be available for policy debate. I hope other scholars will tug at the threads in this book and seek out examples of Reputational Security thinking.
I am grateful to the people who requested particular elements. The book as a whole grew from a series of research visits in which I strove to understand the scope of the Russia’s disruption to global media and help devise an effective response. A visit to the Baltic Republics and Ukraine on behalf of what was then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2016 set the ball rolling. I am grateful to my student Saltanat Kerimbayeva, who facilitated my visit to Kazakhstan in the summer of 2017 that proved critical to my understanding of the challenges facing that country and others like it. Further visits to the Baltics that same year for Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a two-week tour of the western Balkans looking into Britain’s response to the shadow of Russian media disruption fixed and sharpened the concept. The experiences underpinned the creation of my conclusion for the previous book and established an agenda for a sequel. Chapter 1 grew in the telling during the course of 2019. Early versions were presented to Professor Kate Utting’s seminar at the Royal Defense College in London, revised and presented at the invitation of Director General Laura Foraster-Lloret at the relaunch conference of the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia (DIPLOCAT) in Barcelona, and revised again and expanded following a request from Sudarshan Ramabadran of the India Foundation’s Center for Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in Chenai, Younes El-Ghazi of the Global Diplomatic Forum, London, and Baris Gulmez of Izmir University, Türkiye. Responses from their audiences were part of the process. Brian McKercher of Victoria University, Canada, requested a print version and included it in the Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy and Statecraft, second edition (London: Routledge, 2022). Chapter 2 was written for Ido Aharoni of New York University in 2017 and benefits from feedback from the audience at his annual conference on new ideas in diplomacy. It had a second life as a contribution to Corneliu Bjola and Ilan Manor’s Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy for Oxford University Press and is again revised here. The first version of Chapter 3 was written for Peter Pomerantsev, then based at the London School of Economics (LSE), appeared as a report for the Legatum Institute in 2015, and was revised for inclusion in Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and Shaping the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), edited by Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Ulf Schmidt, and Stefan Goebel. It has been broadened and extended to include material on the era of social media and COVID-19. Elements dealing with US counter-disinformation work were road-tested in presentations for the Centre for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the invitation of Lesley Kucharski and to the European Platform on Memory and Conscience, which hosted me in Prague in November 2022. Chapter 4 began as a paper for the Reading Russia conference at University of Leeds in 2018; thanks are owed to the organizer Ilya Yablokov and fellow attendees Vasily Gatov and my old teacher, Nicholas Pronay. I presented a revised version to the fellow’s research seminar at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford during a wonderful sabbatical visit in the spring of 2019, and I appreciate the help of Meera Selva and Eduardo Suarez, both at the time and a year later when they managed to locate a digital copy after my hard drive ate mine. A revised version appeared in Seton Hall’s Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations (Spring/Summer 2021).
Chapter 5 on Information Disarmament was written in January 2020 as a talk for Eric C. Nisbet, then of Ohio State and now of Northwestern University; it was revised for Frederik Norén of Umeå University, Sweden, for the Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda conference at Lund in August 2020. Other elements were developed as a keynote address at the request of Tobias Hochscherf and delivered to the International Association for Media and History Conference in Kiel in 2022. Natalia Tsvetkova of St. Petersburg State University commissioned a written version for that school’s Vestnik of International Relations. It required input from some of the veterans of the work described, including David Hoffman, Ambassador Jack Matlock, Professor Howard Mehlinger, and Ambassador Stephen Rhinesmith. Chapter 6 was originally commissioned by Liam Kennedy of University College Dublin for the pathbreaking collection he edited: Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2022). The piece has benefited from being road-tested at Liam’s diaspora diplomacy conference, as well as at the wonderful program in Cultural Diplomacy hosted each year in Rome by its founder and director, my friend Federica Olivares of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. Chapter 7 reflects work with Stuart MacDonald of the ICR consultancy in the UK on behalf of the British Council. Some elements appeared in a short piece created for William Billows of the IFA and published as “From Zero-Sum Game to Reputational Security,” in Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ed.), Trust: And How Europe Can Gain It: Culture Report Progress Europe (Stuttgart: ifa, 2022). It has also been road-tested in presentations to audiences in India, Ukraine, South Korea, Türkiye, and at the CREDO center of the University of Siena (sadly, all via Zoom) and in person to Federica’s students in Rome and at a wonderful conference hosted in Donestia in the Basque Country by Imanol Galdos. Chapter 8 began life as a piece for Hendrik W. Ohnesorge’s anthology Soft Power and the Future of US Foreign Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023). The final chapter and the whole book benefited from contact with Samantha Custer and her team at the Gates Foundation for Global Policy at William and Mary College in Virginia. I owe a debt to Chancellor Robert Gates for the vote of confidence in featuring the notion of Reputational Security so centrally in his policy symposium of December 2022 and associated report Reputational Security: The Imperative to Reinvest in America’s Strategic Communications Capabilities. The conclusion has had a number of lives in presentations given to the International Studies Association in Montreal, to the Public Diplomacy Interest Group of the International Communicational Association meeting in Paris, and to a Ukraine War forum “The War for Ukraine: Reputational Security and Media Disruption,” in Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2022). I was also glad to present an overview of this work to a terrific conference organized by Geoff Wiseman and David Wellman of the Grace School of Diplomacy at DePaul University. Geoff Wiseman has been especially generous with his encouragement and support of the project. Ambassador Tony Wayne of American University in Washington, DC, allowed me to try out ideas in this book in presentations to his students. My work in this field always benefits from regular exchanges with colleagues around the world. I owe a debt to Joe Nye for his engagement around his prodigal concept. As ever, I appreciate ongoing conversations with Matthew Armstrong, Corneliu Bjola, Emma Briant, Alina Dolea, David W. Ellwood, Eytan Gilboa, Nadia Kaneva, Juan Luis Manfedi, Ilan Manor, James Pamment, Steve Pike, Maria Repnikova, Simon Rofe, Cynthia Schneider, Giles Scott-Smith, Nancy Snow, Pawel Surowiec, Vivian Walker, Matthew Wallin, Rhonda Zaharna, and my collaborators in the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, especially Jeffrey Brison, Linda Jessup, Sasha Priewe, Sarah E. K. Smith, and my old friend César Villanueva Rivas. More recent help has come from Stephanie C. Winkler. I benefited from serving as external examiner for Geoff Heriot when he applied some of these concepts to the case of Australia. I have wonderful colleagues at the University of Southern California, and this particular book has been especially helped by exchanges with Bob Banks, Doug Becker, Mina Chow, David Craig, Clay Dube, Jerry Gianquinta, Tom Goodnight, Patrick James, Henry Jenkins, Lynn Miller, Adam Clayton Powell III, and Stan Rosen. Students in my classes at USC have also helped refine the ideas presented here but are too numerous to mention by name; however, Demme Durrett deserves a special shoutout for hard work as proofreader. Geoff Cowan and the Center for Communication Leadership and Policy provided an institutional home, and Jay Wang and his team welcomed ideas from this book in the various media that they host. The key folks at CPD during the writing phase of the book were Sohaela Amiri, Cesar Corona, Stacy Ingber, and Lisa Rau. I have appreciated being able to work with USC Annenberg’s public diplomats in residence while working on these chapters: Matthew Asada, Elizabeth McKay, and especially Joelle Uzarski, my co-teacher for the two academic years of the pandemic. My work has been supported by Dean Willow Bay and my head of department, Hector Amaya. I have gained much from the ongoing support from colleagues in Washington, DC, especially Sherry Mueller of the Public Diplomacy Council of America. I am grateful to Polity Books for commissioning a sequel and especially to Mary Savigar and Stephanie Homer, who have shepherded and shaped the project with diligence and enthusiasm, and to copyeditors Eric Schramm and Leigh Mueller. In Redondo Beach, Joel Futerer, Peter Kurbikoff, and Bob Reid supported my writing with cheerful breakfasts at Classic Burger, Good Stuff, and Hennessy’s. My wife, Karen Ford Cull, and sons Sandy, Magnus, and Olly Cull gave the whole project meaning. Finally, this book owes much to a twenty-year-and-counting conversation with the great British policy analyst Simon Anholt. Writing this book overlapped with the recording of two seasons of our podcast People, Places, Power, and it is to Simon that this book is dedicated. All flaws are my own.
Nick CullRedondo Beach, CaliforniaJuly 2023
Some of the chapters presented in this volume have been adapted or developed from work previously published:
Chapter 1 – Reputational Security: Frame, Objective, and AgendaChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “From Soft Power to Reputational Security: Rethinking Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy for a Dangerous Age,” in The Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy and Statecraft, 2nd ed., ed. Brian McKercher, pp. 409–19. Copyright (2022) by Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
Chapter 2 – Technology and Reputational Security: Historical Cases of Media Disruption and AdoptionChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “History and Digital Public Diplomacy: Media Disruption and Global Public Engagement Online in Historical Perspective”, in Corneliu Bjola and Ilan Manor (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford Publishing Limited, 2024). Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Chapter 3 – Pushing Back: Counterpropaganda and Reputational SecurityChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “Counter-propaganda: Cases from US public diplomacy and beyond”, in Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt (eds), Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and Shaping the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 269–284. Revised and reproduced with permission.
Chapter 4 – Media Development: A Tool for Reputational SecurityChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “Public Diplomacy as International Media Development: State Funded Pathways to Countering Disinformation,” Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 6–23. Reproduced with permission.
Chapter 5 – Information Disarmament: A Forgotten Element of Reputational SecurityChapter revised from: Nicholas Cull, (2021), “The forgotten process: Information disarmament in the Soviet/US reproachment of the 1980s”, Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. International Relations, 14(3), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu06.2021.301
Chapter 6 – Diaspora Diplomacy: From History to Reputational SecurityChapter revised from: Cull, Nicholas J. “Diasporas and Public Diplomacy: From History to Policy.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Diaspora Diplomacy, ed. Liam Kennedy, pp. 7–18. Copyright (2022) by Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
Chapter 8 – Rethinking US Public Diplomacy: The Apparatus of Reputational SecurityChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “Institutionalizing Reputational Security: Reshaping the Machinery of US Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting for the Post-COVID Era,” in Build Back Better? Soft Power and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, pp. 100–19. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Revised and reproduced with permission.
Conclusion – The Reckoning: Reputational Security and Russia’s War in UkraineChapter revised from: Nicholas J. Cull, “The War for Ukraine: Reputational Security and Media Disruption.” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 19, no. 2 (2023), pp. 195–99. Revised and reproduced with permission.
IntroductionReputation and Soft Power: Image and Action in World Affairs
The purest treasure mortal times affordIs spotless reputation: that away,Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.
Shakespeare, Richard II, act I, scene 1 (c. 1595)
THE world of the twenty-first century is blessed, or some would say cursed, by an unprecedented number of messages on an unprecedented variety of platforms vying for the attention of any one individual. In such a world, it is all the more remarkable when a single story captures global attention, and the world focuses on one person or one place. So it was on 8 September 2022 when news broke that Queen Elizabeth II had died at age 96 and after more than 70 years on the throne of the United Kingdom. In the weeks that followed, an elaborate plan – codenamed Operation London Bridge – played out to mark her passing. While the world watched, the body of Queen Elizabeth lay in state first for a day at St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, and then for a week at Westminster Hall, London, while mourners filed past. She was commemorated at a state funeral in Westminster Abbey and finally laid to rest in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Each stage of the process was accompanied by long, choreographed pageantry and spontaneous moments of emotion. A life lived in the public eye and charted by media, from the glossy pages of Life magazine through the monochrome flickering of terrestrial television culminating in the high-definition, on-demand immediacy of Netflix streaming, had ended. Among the outpouring of commentary was much reflecting on the possibility that the spectacle associated with the queen’s passing might somehow benefit the image of her country.1 The American analyst David Rothkopf noted: “This funeral is a display of soft power, a show [that] nations put on to proclaim and reaffirm their identity [and] say this is our history, our status. It is cultural diplomacy at its highest level.”2
Rothkopf’s comments drew on the language and theory of Soft Power, which is the dominant way in which writers in the field of international relations discuss issues of image and reputation. Soft Power refers to Joseph Nye’s idea that attractive values, culture, and policies can serve as a foreign policy resource alongside the traditional military and economic levers that he termed Hard Power. There was much in the world of 2022 to bear out Nye’s contention, specifically that many international actors were reaching to increase their global visibility by hosting elaborate so-called mega-events. The year 2022 had seen the conclusion of Expo 2020 in Dubai and was about to see Qatar host the FIFA World Cup. But it was also clear that reputation was not always understood or experienced in the positive. Our era is also characterized by governments and citizens rallying to protect reputations. Sometimes it is the leaders who move. In 2018, the Polish government enacted laws to “protect the country’s good name” by enabling the prosecution of anyone who carelessly referred to “Polish Death Camps” rather than “Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.” By 2022 the campaign was a mainstay of Polish Public Diplomacy and nongovernmental activity.3 In 2022 the Turkish government formally requested that the UN and other international actors refer to the country as Türkiye, to avoid making English speakers think either of the edible bird or the slang term for a failed project.4 Elsewhere citizens mobilized. In Italy, the largest farmers’ association launched an international campaign against businesses overseas using mafia-related words and images to market Italian-related products, from the Spanish-based Espresso Mafia (with the tag line “Organized Coffee”) or upstate New York’s Mafia Sauce vodka to Scotland’s Cosa Nostra Shot whiskey in a machine gun–shaped bottle.5 In China, where netizens are regularly roused against international criticism, the public raged against a Chinese-Australian comedian He Huang, whose routine for the Australia’s Got Talent TV show was a viral sensation but included negative stereotypes. Her use of the word “cheap” to describe Chinese women caused particular offense. The English-language connotation of being overly eager to save money was missed: the term was taken to mean sexual laxity.6
All these examples – from the value perceived in the queen’s funeral through the mega-events in the Middle East to the Italian and Chinese communities’ attempts to defend an image – reflect something that we all know from daily life: reputations matter. They suggest that the same balance of advantage and challenge experienced by individuals as they encounter either admiration or criticism or even defamation in their personal life plays out at a governmental level. This chapter revisits the concept of reputation and the dominant frame used to consider its role in foreign policy since the Cold War: Soft Power. It examines its applicability of Soft Power to our current era of renewed great power rivalries and suggests a mismatch. Before considering the notion of Soft Power in its historical context, it is helpful to first step back and recall the long career of reputation in foreign policy and the tendency over the years for its maintenance to require not just rhetoric but action.
Thucydides to Thatcher: A Short History of Reputation in International Relations
Reputation has always been a part of statecraft since the time of ancient kings who understood the elaborate alchemy whereby their own person merged with the image and standing of the state. Kings sought to be seen as both powerful and virtuous, concepts that converged in the notion of honor. They understood that strong and even violent responses to challenges from neighbors could help build a resource for their state at home and abroad. Thucydides famously lists “fear, honor, and interest” as the three principle causes of war, and there is no shortage of examples to bear this out.7 Aside from war, other tools at their disposal included the presentation of elaborate gifts to their fellow monarchs to showcase elements of their domains. Famous examples include the musical organ that the Byzantine emperor Constantine V presented to Pépin III of the Franks in 757 or the famous elephant sent by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid to Emperor Charlemagne in 802. Such lavish gifts helped to establish the reputation of a state but were resource intensive, which was part of the point.8
Reputation and honor or concepts like face in Chinse culture had to be taken seriously when monarchs or their representatives met. From the earliest times, disputes over precedence and due deference were occupational hazards of international gatherings. Consider the disarray to the alliance behind the Third Crusade stemming from an argument over the placement of flags on the battlements at the newly captured city of Acre in 1191. England’s fiery king Richard the Lionheart felt strongly that the ducal standard of Duke Leopold of Austria should not be placed on a par with his own royal flag and the banner of the French monarch Philip II. Richard ordered the duke’s banner to be thrown into the moat. Offended, Duke Leopold abandoned the campaign forthwith.9 Diplomatic protocol evolved specifically to avoid such incidents. The concerns were not trivial as they might seem to modern eyes. Rather, they reflected a keen understanding that a positive and respected image was a resource for the state, and that the monarch who wished to remain secure did well to avoid its depletion.
The foundational thinkers of Western politics acknowledged the importance of reputation. In 1513, writing in the twenty-first chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli addresses the concept of “how a prince should conduct himself as to gain renown.” Noting that “nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting a fine example,” he cites Ferdinand of Spain, praising the scope of his actions while noting his penchant to using the “cloak” of religion to justify “pious cruelty” against the Moors. Machiavelli also notes the value to a prince of staged festivals and spectacular events, and of their mixing with people on such occasions to build his reputation: “Further he ought to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles at convenient seasons of the year … and show himself an example of courtesy and liberality; nevertheless, always maintaining the majesty of his rank, for this he must never consent to abate in anything.”10
Shakespeare comments on the primacy of reputation for individuals and states alike. Characters speak of their reputations as the part of themselves most worth defending. In Othello two characters debate the nature of reputation. The newly demoted Cassio mourns: “O, I have / lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of / myself, and what remains is bestial.” The villainous Iago consoles him by minimizing the value of reputation: “Reputation is an idle and / most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost / without deserving. You have lost no reputation at / all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.”11 While Shakespeare flirts with dismissing reputation, by giving the view to a villain, Iago, he plainly undercuts that position. Personal reputation scales to the behavior of rulers. In Measure for Measure, Isabella begs mercy from Duke Angelo by reminding him of one of the core paradoxes of power: “Oh it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant.”12 But there is hope in the value of good deeds. In the Merchant of Venice, Portia explains: “How far that little candle throws its beams, / So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”13
Thomas Hobbes also considered reputation to be a component of power, noting in Leviathan in 1651: “Reputation of Prudence in the conduct of Peace or War, is Power; because to prudent men, we commit the government of ourselves, more willingly than to others.” He also acknowledged the more immediate appeal of eloquence and physical beauty that he called “Forme”: “Eloquence is Power; because it is seeming Prudence. Forme is Power; because being a promise of Good, it recommendeth men to the favour of women and strangers.” Such things are components of image rather than reputation as they are without the time-centered dimension of past experience, though both “forme” and “eloquence” raise expectations of future performance.14
Concrete examples of leaders engaging with issues of international reputation abound. Examples include new regimes seeking to establish a positive reputation and perhaps win allies – as was the case with William the Silent publishing his Apologia of 1581 in multiple languages to explain the Dutch Revolt. States seeking to defend reputations constitute a second category. In the Early Modern period it became a standard practice for states to issue so-called war manifestos explaining the legitimacy of a conflict. The best-known example is that created by the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in 1631 to limit the reputational damage from his entry into the Thirty Years War. He also tried to ensure that his army back up his claim to morality by behaving with restraint. The era had a short-hand term for concept of state reputation – Gloire or “glory” – and acting to protect it was expected. The great master of gloire was Louis XIV of France, who styled himself “Roi de Soleil” or Sun King and engaged artists, architects, admirals, and armies with enthusiasm to carry the claim forward. The preoccupation with reputation was explicitly linked to diplomacy when image conscious leaders like Louis XIV or successive English governments lobbied their neighbors to censor pamphlets published within their borders held to be detrimental to the royal or national image.15
In the nineteenth century publics themselves – empowered by increased democratization and better informed thanks to the growth of the press – began to pay attention to the tides of international prestige and standing that had long captured their leaders. The desire to increase national reputations to match neighbors was one of the drivers of European imperialism as citizens demanded a “place in the sun.” Some populations supported decisive responses to reputational slights. In July 1870 Germans rallied to Bismarck’s hard line in response to the apparent slight to the monarch – revealed in the so-called Ems Dispatch – and French publics rallied to their own wire services’ translation of the same document, with feeling boiling over into the Franco-Prussian War.16 Reputation and prestige were sometimes linked to things of no practical application, like sporting achievement at the newly established Olympic Games. Elsewhere they were linked to things with a direct correlation to military strength, though when British crowds in 1909 demanded more battleships with chants outside parliament of “we want eight and we won’t wait,” the issue was more psychological than a genuine understanding of the balance of naval power in the world.17
In the emerging US, issues of national prestige were plainly understood. The ultimate investments in such positive displays as the St. Louis World’s Fair are well known. Hardly less interesting are the arguments from the negative, such as the bid to convince a skeptical Congress to fund the 1876 exposition in Philadelphia. The chronicler of that event observed:
As the U.S. had by its invitations to foreign powers to participate in the exhibition given to it an international character … Congress was morally bound to aid the enterprise with a liberal appropriation, if for no other reason, for the simple purpose of sustaining the credit of the country in the eyes of the world.18
In the spring of 1914, when, as part of the resolution of a dispute, Mexican forces at Veracruz refused to salute the US flag, the implicit insult to the reputation of the US was accepted as a justification for US forces to seize the city.19
In the nuclear age, issues of reputation and communicating resolution to potential enemies became a central part of the diplomacy of brinksmanship. The US national strategy document NSC 68 of 1950 had a concern for reputation at its heart. It moved the US into a zero-sum game such that a setback for the US anywhere was a setback for it everywhere. While the document itself was secret, its logic became common political wisdom in the era.20 One of the famous television debates between candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential election turned on Kennedy presenting evidence that the Soviet Union had overtaken the US in terms of its global prestige, largely as a result of the stunning coup of launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Once in office, President Kennedy elevated the strategic significance of credibility. In an often-quoted Vienna interview with James Reston of the New York Times, bruised by the failure of US-backed rebels to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, he explained: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The thinking displaced the domino theory in the Kennedy White House as the principal driver of the escalation of the US military commitment to that corner of Southeast Asia.21 Historian Gabriel Kolko considered credibility as
the hypnotic justification which unified virtually all those who shape fundamental policy [toward Vietnam]. As an emotional belief credibility was immensely effective, especially for President Johnson, who equated it with the 20th century’s experience with appeasement and the faith American allies everywhere would have in their many security treaties with [the United States government].22
An administration later, a similar interplay of image and reality was built into the thinking of President Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as he explained when seeking to justify ongoing expenditure of conventional military strength in a National Security Council meeting in August 1970:
We have to have forces in which we can believe before we can project. We must be able to project a credible power abroad in a situation where general nuclear war is no longer a likely or reasonable alternative. The general-purpose forces are the way we are seen by allies – they are the contact and the reality.23
Kissinger’s successor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw reputation as one of the issues at stake in the Iran hostage crisis: “Our credibility in the [Middle East] region and in Europe hangs on our willingness and ability to fight the Soviets on the ground in Iran and elsewhere, if horizontal escalation is necessary.”24 The missteps of the US in trying to free the hostages and apparent weakness of the US elsewhere in the world became one of many major foreign policy challenges for the Reagan administration in the 1980s, driving an expansion of US Public Diplomacy.
Similar concerns operated elsewhere in the world. In 1980 Saudi Arabia launched a massive diplomatic campaign to block the screening of Death of a Princess, a TV docudrama directed by the distinguished documentarist Antony Thomas about royal corruption in an unnamed Arab kingdom, which the Saudi government saw as a serious threat to their country’s reputation. Although the film was broadcast, in the UK and elsewhere it was not repeated.25 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher also understood the role of image in politics. In 1985, for example, her government partnered with the National Gallery in Washington, DC, to create a spectacular exhibition about art collecting and patronage called “Treasure Houses of Britain.”26 But the Thatcher government’s reputation work also included a media campaign around events in Northern Ireland. Sometimes it acted to preserve reputation. When in the spring of 1982 the government of Argentina seized the Falkland Islands / Islas Malvinas in the South Atlantic, Thatcher launched what some at the time dubbed “The War of Thatcher’s Face,” though to be fair she understood the standing of the whole country to be on the line.27 Her conduct of the war emphasized tight control of information and set a precedent for media military relations for the years that followed, but it was the reputation as carried by popular culture that seemed most effective in the era’s standoff with the Soviet Union and – once political change had begun – helped ensure the dominance of a concept that encapsulated it: Soft Power.
The Concept and Its Moment: Soft Power in the Post-Cold War World
Soft Power, from its first articulation by Joseph Nye at the end of Cold War, has served as the core idea underpinning the engagement of foreign publics by the US and many other countries around the world. In policy application it is closely associated with another piece of terminology originating in the US: Public Diplomacy. First coined in the mid-1960s, the term served the US well during the Cold War as a convenient portmanteau for the set of activities by which the leading nations sought to advance their foreign policy through engagement with foreign publics. The term had the added attraction of allowing the more pejorative vocabulary of propaganda to be reserved for the discussion of enemy activity. It also belonged more clearly to the high-status realm of diplomacy than the dry euphemism of “information” that had dominated overt communication during the Second World War and early Cold War. Similarly, it avoided the overly aggressive term psychological warfare favored for covert and military mass communications in the era. For the US government, Public Diplomacy meant investment in international broadcasting via Voice of America and other stations, funding for Fulbright exchanges, and the multifaceted global infrastructure of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Such activities came under review with the end of Cold War despite their having a share in the credit for the successful conclusion of that conflict. Congress was keen to deliver a peace dividend by cutting unnecessary Cold War programs.28 Then came the concept of Soft Power.
Soft Power began life as part of Harvard professor Joseph Nye’s rebuttal of the thesis of relative decline that emerged at the end of the 1980s. In its best-known articulation, British historian Paul Kennedy argued that the US was bound to be surpassed because of the overstretch of its military and economic resources.29 Nye’s counterargument was well made. He pointed out that power could not be measured by military and economic strength alone but drew on admiration for values and culture. Such things helped nations to set agendas and rally the international community to act in ways that served their goals. Part of the idea’s brilliance was that it could appeal to both sides in the great debate then raging within US international relations as it provided a realist logic for constructivist policies. It also fitted the realization of American strength as the Soviet Union crumbled. The unrivaled strength of the US in the area of Soft Power helped to explain how it had come to prevail in the Cold War. Nye argued that despite challenges to its military and economy the US was, as the title of his 1990 book had it, Bound to Lead.30 There were some hiccups. Nye found that some American scholars assumed that wealth and Soft Power were the same thing. Others pushed back, asserting that only what Nye called Hard Power really mattered.31 For US Public Diplomacy, the concept of Soft Power provided a convenient way to talk about the value of cultural resources like scholarships and world expo pavilions. But there was a catch. It seemed to most observers that the US already enjoyed a preponderance of Soft Power and hence that government investment in Public Diplomacy was unnecessary. As talk of Soft Power increased, Public Diplomacy budgets fell and USIA was ignominiously merged into the Department of State. Then came the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.32
The attacks on 9/11 shook assumptions over America’s standing in the world. Where Bill Clinton had gloried in the US being “the indispensable nation,” George W. Bush asked, “Why do they hate us?” Nye responded with a refinement of the Soft Power concept in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), setting an agenda for the new century.33 The discourse now included elements from other scholars, including John Arquilla and David Rondfeldt, who observed that in the future the power with the best story would win; this became so much a part of the standard discussion of Soft Power that it was sometimes attributed to Nye.34 Also significant were Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Laughlin, and Laura Roselle, whose concept of “strategic narratives” actually delved into the mechanism underpinning reputational success.35 Simon Anholt’s concept of the Nation Brand emerged as second only to Soft Power in its success in policy circles, not least because of the consultants eager to sell an associated practice of Nation Branding.36 Meanwhile, Nye himself helped theorize the fusion of Hard Power and Soft Power into a coordinated approach of Smart Power. The concept embraced both outreach through communication and such Public Diplomacy of the deed as development aid programs.37
Nye’s fine-tuning ensured that the core idea of Soft Power still matched the era perfectly. With Soft Power as its justification, the zero-sum communication competition of the bipolar Cold War evolved into a multipolar model in which many countries sought international attention through a range of Public Diplomacy activities. The George W. Bush administration had looked on Hard and Soft Power as twin resources that could be wielded simultaneously. The experience of the war in Iraq and wider Global War on Terror suggested that there might be a tradeoff as the overuse or misuse of Hard Power could undermine Soft Power. The war in Vietnam had pointed in the same direction. The experience of Iraq prompted Barack Obama to recall in his 2009 landmark speech in Cairo the hope of Thomas Jefferson: “The less we use our power, the greater it will be.”38 The idea of Soft Power endured and underwent further refinement. Nye’s 2011 study The Future of Power added admirable “policies” to “values and culture” to create a three-part wellspring of international influence. Obvious “admirable policies” included respect for human rights and sustainability.39
Soft Power flourished, crystalizing into very different policies in locations as different as Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Modi’s India, Abe’s Japan, and the US, first of Obama and then of Donald Trump.40 For some commentators Soft Power–directed events like the London Olympics of 2012 were missing the point. In 2014 Christopher Hill and Sarah Beadle drew attention to the limits of Soft Power:
The assets that really matter are the deeper, slow-moving qualities of a society and not the surface glitter of a successful Olympics or royal wedding. Governments would be well advised to recognise that the key quality of soft power is its primary location in civil society. Soft Power begins at home, as reputation and trust are both intimately linked to the nature of domestic achievements.41
For others, the differences between policies that termed themselves Soft Power opened serious questions as to the utility of the formulation.
The Watershed: Facing Soft Power’s Limits
It was only perceptible in retrospect, but by 2015 the world had changed.42 The crisis associated with the clash between radical Islam and the West was superseded by a new multifaceted crisis. The global nature of this new crisis speaks to global causes. The worldwide economic downturn of 2008 provided a shower of individual sparks to decades of accumulating tinder. The post-Cold War confidence in globalization receded as multiple countries sought refuge in populism. Leaders looked to rally domestic support with idealized accounts of past glory and explained its loss through stories of victimhood and the misdeeds of others. With pledges to “take back control” and “make” the country “great again,” the strongmen took the reins or held them still tighter. Ankara, Beijing, Brasilia, Budapest, Manila, Moscow, and other capitals all voiced their variations on the theme. London and Washington were no exception. International rivalries swung back
