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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

‘PUBLIC DIPLOMACY’ BEFORE GULLION: THE EVOLUTION OF A PHRASE
APR 18, 2006 - 1:16PM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
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[Click here to download this report (.pdf).] Every academic discipline has its certainties, and in the small field of public diplomacy studies it is a truth universally acknowledged that the term "public diplomacy" was coined in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a distinguished retired foreign service officer, when he established an Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy. An early Murrow Center brochure provided a convenient summary of Gullion's concept: Public diplomacy… deals with the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy; the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with another; the reporting of foreign affairs and its impact on policy; communication between those whose job is communication, as diplomats and foreign correspondents; and the process of intercultural communications. This essay will endeavor to look at the forgotten pre-history of this phrase in reportage and diplomatic discourse, a task made possible thanks to the creation of fully text searchable versions of historical newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor. While this analysis bears out that Gullion was the first to use the phrase in its modern meaning, it also reveals that Gullion's phrase was not so much a new coinage in 1965 as a fresh use of an established phrase. Ironically, this new use of an old term was necessary because the even older term "propaganda" which Gullion confessed he preferred -- had accumulated so many negative connotations. The earliest use of the phrase "public diplomacy" to surface is actually not American at all but in a leader piece from the London Times in January 1856. It is used merely as a synonym for civility in a piece criticizing the posturing of President Franklin Pierce. "The statesmen of America must recollect," the Times opined, "that, if they have to make, as they conceive, a certain impression upon us, they have also to set an example for their own people, and there are few examples so catching as those of public diplomacy." The first use quoted by the New York Times was in January 1871, in reporting a Congressional debate. Representative Samuel S. Cox (a Democrat from New York, and a former journalist) spoke in high dudgeon against secret intrigue to annex the Republic of Dominica, noting he believed in "open, public diplomacy." It was a use which anticipated the major articulation of the phrase thirty-five years later in the Great War. During the Great War the phrase "public diplomacy" was widely used to describe a cluster of new diplomatic practices. These practices ranged from successive German statements around submarine warfare policy, through public declarations of terms for peace, to Woodrow Wilson's idealistic vision -- as expressed in the opening point of his "fourteen points" speech of 8 January 1918 -- of an entire international system founded…... FULL TEXT
 
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Ori Noy on June 9, 2006 @ 11:51 am:
Another early mention of "public diplomacy" can be found in a speech by WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE on "The Neutrality of Belgium" (House of Commons, August 8 and 10, 1870).
Of course, Mr. GLADSTONE refers to what we call today "open Diplomacy".
The speech can be found in an E-book: Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914- edited by EDGAR R. JONES. The book can be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10990
regards
Ori Noy

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