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UK FOREIGN OFFICE RESPONSE TO THE CPD BOOK REVIEW OF “ENGAGEMENT”
By Jolyon Welsh and Daniel Fearn, Supervising editors


Reviewed by UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office
NOV 24, 2008

The following is a response from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office to Paul Sharp’s CPD Book Review of Engagement: Public Diplomacy in a Globalised World. For a PDF of the full FCO Publication, click here When Paul Sharp says that our publication “Engagement” asks more questions than it answers, he is right. Our aim was not to try to come up with a rigid template for public diplomacy but to sketch out a theory of engagement that gives a revived public diplomacy a much higher profile, describing a practical toolkit useful to support foreign policy objectives. Our stance is that public diplomacy is absolutely not an “add on” to traditional diplomacy; it belongs in the mainstream of international relations. Professor Sharp does, however, ask some important questions: Is public diplomacy really different from propaganda? Is there a tension between national interest and being a good multilateralist? Are diplomats there to manage relationships or are they judgment makers and decision takers? Let’s start with propaganda. No one can deny that propaganda has had and will continue to have its uses, most explicitly when a people is engaged in war for national survival, as was the case in World War II. But for everyday use, a better definition of public diplomacy is John Brown’s:  “truthful, factual exposition and explication of a nation’s foreign policy”. Whilst propaganda forces its messages on an audience, and oversimplifies or even demonises contending positions, good public diplomacy listens, engages and tries to present a nation’s own goals and achievements transparently and with supporting evidence. Propaganda is by definition one-way communication, designed to be inscrutable or even to trick the target audience. It implies that one party has a firm position or ideology that it wishes to impose via highly persuasive communication techniques upon another.  Strategic communication, in the hands of a skilled public diplomatist, is, by contrast, a systematic approach to delivering objectives by generating more effective understanding of audiences and more effective ways of connecting with them to develop solutions that potentially shift attitudes and change behaviours on all sides. The decisive point is that this understanding can shape the policy goal itself. The means employed in Public Diplomacy differ, therefore, from those used in propaganda.  For example, when the UK Department of Health set out to re-shape its thinking through the use of strategic communication, its tools included a consultation exercise in which the views of 10,000 people were taken into account. It would be very cynical to regard this as propaganda. Professor Sharp’s unease comes from his sense that the ends in strong public diplomacy – behaviour change – are the same. But wanting to change someone else’s behaviour isn’t restricted to either public diplomacy or propaganda. It’s there in most forms of professional communication – whether a car advertisement or a blog on the website of a campaigning NGO. Our aim in “Engagement” was to show that public diplomacy can make foreign policy more open, more thoughtful, more rigorous, more professional and…...  -->

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