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ENGAGEMENT: PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
By Jolyon Welsh and Daniel Fearn, Supervising editors


Reviewed by Paul Sharp
SEP 22, 2008

For a PDF of the full FCO Publication, click here For the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s response to this review, click here. This is an excellent volume of essays on aspects of public diplomacy commissioned by Jim Murphy MP, the Minister for Europe at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and made freely available online at the address above. Mr. Murphy and the FCO are to be commended for this effort. The breadth of the subjects covered, together with the manner of their treatment and the format in which they appear are all testament to the central thesis of the collection, namely that the way many international relations are handled is changing and changing fast in response to globalization. These changes are no more in evidence than in the (re)emergence of public diplomacy as both an instrument of foreign policy exploiting new techniques of communication made possible by the revolutions in information and communications technologies, and as a way of conducting international relations in general with the potential to subsume, not only more traditional relations, but also the very actors between whom they are undertaken. The collection consists of two parts, the first with ten essays on aspects of public diplomacy in general; the second of two essays with case studies. It begins with a look back at the lessons learned from past experience provided by the University of Southern California’s Nicholas J. Cull and Simon Anholt, a consultant who serves as an independent member of the FCO’s Public Diplomacy Board. Effective public diplomacy begins with listening, for example, and it also recognizes its own limits. You cannot simply brand a country in the same way you brand a product, but you can help people in other countries see your strengths and virtues more clearly. Alex Evans, a Non-Resident Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and River Path Associates’ Managing Director, David Steven then sketch out a theory of contemporary foreign policy influence for addressing primary global issues like terrorism, good government in developing countries, and climate change. Public diplomacy contributes to solving these problems by building successively: a shared understanding of what they are; a shared platform for a campaign of change; and a shared operating system within which collective response can be undertaken. Professor Brian Hocking, in contrast, is more interested in the processes engendered by a shift from hierarchical structures to horizontal networks in social relations. The challenge for governments and their diplomats is to learn how to task these networks and get them to do what you want by working effectively with a wide variety of stakeholders who inhabit them and need to be involved in the policy process as early as possible. The focus of the volume then shifts from a world of possibly new, but familiar, players to the world of difference implied by culture. Inter-cultural connections build confidence, argues the British Council’s Martin Davidson, as he sketches out roles for diplomats as “boundary spanners” and innovative “network weavers”…...  -->

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