Public Diplomacy in a Changing World

This volume of The Annals follows four previous volumes, reviewed in this issue in a reflective essay by Nancy Snow, which the American Academy of Political and Social Science has published on various aspects of the subject now widely called public diplomacy or, for short, PD.  The topics of the earlier Annals issues were the U.S. image abroad (1954), international education (1961), the exchange of persons (1976), and the Fulbright experience (1987).  The present volume edited by Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas J. Cull of the University of Southern California, with its active Center for the study of the subject, is more comprehensive.  It includes essays on international broadcasting, place branding, and the distinctive PD initiatives of Cuba and Venezuela as well as the People’s Republic of China and, principally, the United States.  Several essays engage in “theorizing public diplomacy,” by attempting to fit it into larger conceptual frameworks.  The volume is rich in historical and institutional information, with ample scholarly references.  With its broad range of coverage, and its scope of ambition, the Cowan-Cull Annals volume on “Public Diplomacy in a Changing World” may well become a landmark, as a valuable reference work and a current assessment of an expanding field.

The “field” of public diplomacy is not one that is easy to circumscribe, or to define.  Many attempts have been made to say exactly what “public diplomacy” is ever since Ambassador Edmund A. Gullion, as Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, institutionalized the term in 1965 when he established The Edward R. Murrow Center for the Study and Advancement of Public Diplomacy.  By now, the general meaning of PD—the purposeful use of the press and other communications media and links with elements in the populations of other countries mainly in order to influence their governments, in ways that traditional diplomacy cannot—is fairly well known and understood.  The basic idea, which of course existed “before Gullion,” has proved seminal.  As Bruce Gregory in his essay (“Public Diplomacy: Sunrise of an Academic Field”) in the Annals volume attests, there has been considerable growth of the subject, with an increase in the number of “practitioners” teaching public diplomacy and related courses, “strengthening a trend” that began with the creation of the Murrow Center.

The acceptance of public diplomacy as an academic field has not resolved a fundamental issue within it.  This is the question—not just a definitional one—of whether it is the government that conducts it (with diplomacy of any kind being considered properly, even legally, an official function) or whether private persons and groups (individual citizens as well as corporations, unions, churches, universities, foundations, service organizations, and other NGOs) can, as “diplomats,” play in the field too.  Are the latter responsible?  Are they accountable?  Are they as effective as they say they are?  Feelings can run high on these points, although both sides of the PD “ownership” divide now increasingly recognize the need for public-private partnership, both at home and abroad.  The explanation of the détente is partly a widespread realization that governments can’t do everything.  It also reflects a conceptual development within public diplomacy itself:  as necessarily going beyond one- or even two-way image projection or verbal persuasion to real relationship-building through involvement in joint action alongside foreign counterparts—the “diplomacy of deeds,” it has been called.  “Moving from Monologue to Dialogue to Collaboration” is how Geoffrey Cowan and Amelia Arsenault describe this development in an essay.  By working together—in natural disaster reconstruction tasks, for example—the initiative, the responsibility, and the credit for a positive outcome can be shared.  The exact balance of governmental and non-governmental involvement in such operations, however, can be a very delicate matter.  Nicholas Cull in his historical taxonomy of the entire subject of public diplomacy in the Annals volume identifies the subtle factor of “the appearance of a wholly different relationship to government,” in varying situations, as a key to whether PD will flourish, particularly with regard to the “credibility” of a message or mission.

The problem can be stated more philosophically:  Is it the State, acting on the basis of a doctrine of National Interest, that is determinative of a country’s relations with the world?  Or is it Society, a country’s People themselves (in the American case, a highly diverse population with ethnic and other ties with others elsewhere) that explains and validates a country’s interaction with others?  It is indeed the identity of “the nation” as well as its interest that should and, increasingly, does drive most national PD programs.  “Diplomacy” thus can become truly an international relationship, and not merely an interstate relationship.

Cowan and Cull in their editorial preface to the volume implicitly bridge—perhaps even consciously finesse—the above who-owns-PD issue by defining public diplomacy as “an international actor’s attempt to advance the ends of policy by engaging with foreign publics” (emphasis added).  This brief definition allows for the possibility of autonomous involvement in PD by non-state players.  Similarly, Eytan Gilboa in a theoretical essay recognizes “the growing interdependence among all actors.”  It may be noticed that Cowan and Cull, perhaps not wholly intentionally, limit the “public diplomatic” field in their definition to policy-related matters—as distinct from, for instance, international commercial transactions or tourist travel.  Their formulation begs the primary question, however, of whose policy—whose message-content—is being advanced.

Among the essays in the Annals volume there is a wide difference in perspective regarding this fundamental question.  Yiwei Wang in a frank and revealing essay on “Public Diplomacy and the Rise of Chinese Soft Power” observes that “the Chinese political system operates under the principle of democratic centralism”—State control.  He appears himself to favor increased governmental centralization, or integrated management, of diplomacy, including public diplomacy, even while pointing out that Chinese diplomats, accepting Zhou Enlai’s dictum “wai shi wu xiao shi” (there is no small issue in foreign affairs), have tended in obedience to be “overcautious.”  China’s diplomatic system is so “complicated by many departments and groups,” which Wang identifies in his essay, that it is difficult for China to “make long-term strategic arrangements to practice public diplomacy.”  In the past Beijing has emphasized “high politics” and neglected “grass-roots politics.”  The Chinese often have been surprised therefore when, for instance, “the White House sends goodwill gestures to China” and “the U.S. Congress expresses hostility.”  In order to “make the world accept the rise of Chinese power”—evidently its policy goal—the Chinese government “has to go beyond the traditional model of diplomacy,” suggests Wang, and “to initiate public diplomacy to engage foreign civil society”—thus to accomplish “the historic transition from soft power to a soft rise.”

The originator of the now-universal blanket term “soft power,” Joseph S. Nye, Jr., in an essay also appears to hold an essentially State-based concept of PD—one of the ways of “getting others to want the outcomes that you want,” i.e., through co-optation rather than coercion.  The “you” in Nye’s formulation refers, of course, not just to the United States.  Countries without “hard power” (military strength or heavy economic assets) also can use PD to exercise “soft power.”  It is not always clear, however, that such countries have “the assets that produce such attraction,” and thus possess any kind of “power” at all.  (My own view is that “power” is a misnomer in diplomacy, in any case.)  Revolutionary Cuba has mainly just its colorful traditional culture to offer, as well as its more recently developed though under-resourced medical services.  Venezuela, however, has the asset of oil, which the Chávez government can offer cheaply or even give away in the name of its “Bolivarian” ideals.  “If taken too far,” as Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig advise in their intricate and interesting essay contrasting the PD initiatives of these two dissident countries, “populist generosity can appear openly patronizing, a conundrum the United States has often faced with its own foreign aid programs.”

Peter van Ham, in a lively essay on the currently fashionable idea of place branding, with reference particularly to the 27-member-country European Union, observes that “the EU may be viewed as the ultimate affluence brand.”  It has resources to spare.  It is still, however, perceived as a “civilian power,” without the military assets or the political capacity needed for it to achieve its full potential.  Van Ham wonders:  Can the EU alter its image—its “brand”?  He situates place branding within the wider spectrum of “postmodern power,” and suggests that identities can be consciously constructed.  (He, like several of the volume’s other authors, shows a strong intellectual interest in constructivism.)  The EU has “a powerful logo” but it has something more, van Ham stresses:  a commitment to law, civility, and mutual trust, and therefore a moral quality and a potential normative influence.  “Surely, European political life is not perfect,” he allows, “but for Arabs, Asians, and Africans alike, the EU model may serve as a powerful dream for their own regions.”  The European Union is essentially still an intergovernmental rather than collective political space.  It therefore has to be diplomacy as well as cross-national elite and mass communication that “constructs” it.  When the European Constitutional Treaty failed to achieve a sufficient number of ratifications, the European Commissioner for Communications, Margot Wallström, launched Plan D—Debate, Democracy, Dialogue—in order better to connect the EU with its citizens.  There remains nonetheless a general reluctance to create “a European masterbrand,” for that would compete with national identities and solidarities.  Furthermore, in a fast-globalizing international economy, it might obliterate the niche advantages that localities and their residents might now have or be able to develop in order to survive and prosper.

Opposition to top-down diplomacy, whether at the national or the supranational governmental level, emerges most strongly in the Annals volume in the essay by the sociologist Manuel Castells, titled “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance.”  For Castells “public diplomacy” is, quite simply, “the diplomacy of the public.”  That is, it is something to be conducted by people themselves.  In practice, “the People” may be activists who are engaged in movements for indigenous rights, sustainable development, the anti-personnel landmines ban, abolition of nuclear weapons, and other existential forms of peace and justice.  “Because people have come to distrust the logic of instrumental politics,” he observes, “the method of direct action on direct outputs finds increasing support.”  Far from advocating a strengthening of governmental diplomacy, Castells places his faith in “the formation of a global civil society and a global network state”—that is, “de facto global governance without a global government.”

Despite this profound difference of philosophical stance, Castells is not different in his understanding of the basic idea of PD from other contributors to the Annals volume, nearly all of whom recognize and approve the rise of people power.  The leitmotif of the volume is the need for better public opinion research—the bedrock of public diplomacy.  Nicholas Cull stresses the importance of “listening,” including targeted polling in other countries.  In the business of place branding, as Peter van Ham emphasizes, the “consumer” is king.  For Monroe E. Price, Susan Haas, and Drew Margolin in their essay on international broadcasting, the “audience” is all-important, and communications technologies should be chosen according to it, as well as to the policy mission.  Giles Scott-Smith in an essay discussing exchange programs and international relations theory focuses on “opinion leaders” and “the multiplier effect” of their roles abroad as “interpreters” within their societies.

In the “Changing World” for Public Diplomacy of this Annals volume, with its new technologies, shifting power structures, and diffusing information, PD strategies must be “smart,” as Joseph Nye and also Ernest J. Wilson III argue in their contributions to the Cowan-Cull collection.  The world itself has “become smarter,” Wilson explains, owing to the spread of education, the increased availability of media outlets, the new affluence and sophistication of elites in China and other fast-developing countries, and, not least, the force of democracy.  From the perspective of the United States government, the new “smartness” of target audiences abroad has become, paradoxically, an embarrassment and a constraint, Wilson interestingly comments.  “The spread of democratic practices has meant that foreign leaders also have less leeway than in the past to act as American surrogates, as stand-ins for American power from over the horizon.”  However, Wilson acknowledges, today’s more democratic world also offers hope and presents new opportunities.  For diplomacy, the Changing World means becoming more open, more public, and much more communicative.  All diplomacy may never become public diplomacy, as some have suggested, but the world’s public will surely become more “diplomatic.”

About the reviewer

Alan K. Henrikson is Director of Diplomatic Studies at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, where he recently chaired the Edward R. Murrow 100th Anniversary Conference, “Credible Public Diplomacy—A Lesson for Our Times”.  He is author of What Can Public Diplomacy Achieve? (Clingendael, 2006).