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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.

TAKING TURNER TO CHINA
OCT 1, 2008 - 1:38PM PDT
Posted by John Worne
All posts by this author

It's been great to get such thoughtful comments on our International Relations Spectrum. One way for me to understand other perspectives would be to take a piece of our work at the British Council and look at how we could frame it. Here's a case study to take views on what it could be for – in terms of intentions - and how we could/should describe it and deliver it to maximize its impact. I'll deliberately exaggerate for effect, but let's imagine you can take a J.M.W. Turner exhibition to China in three different guises: A cultural diplomacy (CD) guise; a public diplomacy (PD) guise; a cultural relations (CR) guise. If you take it in an extreme CD guise, you could be trying to say that our country/civilization is far more advanced than yours; we've had Arts and Crafts for hundreds of years; we are more virile and our world view will prevail. That perhaps is what you might have had in the Cold War in some of the things that were done between East and West in sport and culture and science. An extreme PD way of doing it, might be to claim (rather spuriously, I think) that Turner was the first climate change painter, because you would only have had Turner's incredible skies with the smog of the industrial revolution. There is a claim that his skies are not hyper-real; however, they are actually what he was seeing because of the “pea-soup” of pollution that was floating over London. So if you were taking Turner in a PD guise you could say, "Here, China, you are on the way to being one of the world's biggest polluters, what are you doing to tackle climate change?" In taking Turner in a CR guise, I think you could conduct a much richer “shared” conversation about what was being painted in China during Turner's time, what role the landscape has in China's cultural heritage, what is happening to our collective environment here and there etc. You would be having a much richer set of conversations because you would not necessarily tend towards “boasting”, which is the extreme CD frame or “shouting/telling” which is the extreme PD one. I'd be interested to hear about other real world examples - of how a piece of work can be delivered - with different intentions: CD, PD or CR and how that affects impact and engagement in other practitioners' experience.
 
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Nick Cull on October 2, 2008 @ 3:29 pm:
I appreciate your point John, and actually think your example is completely consistent with my taxonomy. I'd merely say that the first approach was cultural diplomacy, the second was advocacy and the third was exchange diplomacy. I believe that Public Diplomacy is defined by:
1) being a device which an international actor uses to advance their goals and
2) advancing those goals through engaging a foreign audience. If the audience is domestic it isn't public diplomacy.

All three of your examples are public diplomacy in my terms -- you merely restrict your use of the term public diplomacy to mean only the advocacy function. I believe that advocacy, exchange/faciltiation and cultural diplomacy are all varieties of public diplomacy, along with international broadcasting and listening. I feel that these forms need to be carefully firewalled to preserve credibility and allow propper function. I understand that your objective is to speak in support of the distinctiveness of the British Council's mission and the need for its independence from the advocacy function at the FCO and agree with that. The big flaw in American public diplomacy has been allowing the advocacy function to dominate and short term policy interest to trump everything else within the structure. Just because we have one concept of Public Diplomacy does not mean we have to have one agency, or one person calling the shots. In Public Diplomacy diversity of approach is a strength, especially if one of those approaches is listening.

james edwards on October 13, 2008 @ 5:49 pm:
John Worne questions the need for PD.
Nick advocates expansion of the term public diplomacy to include JW's perspective.
While it is pleasing to see the essential element in diplomacy of listening to others being included after a long absence in the discussion now, for me and many others Nick's insistence on Public Diplomacy is a bad place to start if reason and balance is the desired end. It has too much of the realities of propaganda embedded in its source as a means to employ propaganda at home in association with foreign contacts and aid in order to avoid the laws against doing so in the USA. One shocking result of this duplicity is that similar tactics are used in domestic politics of the USA to the detriment of the sanity of the American people.
The fine distinctions that flourish in the broad cultural environment established by this initiative are an impediment to any effective grasp of reality.
Language that confuses is bad language. CR is not bad language until someone tries to shoehorn PD into it or worse still tries to shoehorn it into PD.

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