Cultural Diplomacy
The Iranian Embassy opened "Iran Cultural Week" in Jakarta on Wednesday in an effort to open up a cultural exchange between the two allies.
Figures from Germany's culture and language promotion agency, the Goethe Institute, show that people in southern Europe -- where unemployment is high, particularly among the young -- are clamoring to learn German. Other official data show immigration to Germany from Spain, Greece and Portugal is up sharply.
What the United Kingdom can offer to India that other countries cannot, says the new British High Commissioner to India James Bevan, is the English language.Britain is providing English language training to a million Indian teachers, a programme that will indirectly reach a third of India’s population.
This year's Oscar for the best foreign film went to Iran, a country which is grappling with a tense international environment because of its nuclear program. One debate, always important to Iranians, is about the contribution of such movies to the Iranian image.
The cultural institutions of most countries are autonomous, unconnected with any local educational facility. But China’s Confucius Institutes are different, leading to criticism from some teachers, education authorities and parts of the media.
...Dickinson State College in North Dakota became the most recent university to turn down a Confucius Institute — a cultural outpost of the Chinese government that already has 350 branches on campuses around the world, from Paris Diderot University to Penn State University, and from Argentina to Zimbabwe.
Cultural and humanitarian diplomacy is multifaceted including cultural policy, information and advocacy. There is a reason for naming the traditional diplomacy as the “hard power”, while the cultural or public diplomacy is called as the “soft power”.