The early 2000s did feel like the European moment... In this magazine in 2004, Parag Khanna described the "stylish" European Union as a "metrosexual superpower" strutting past the testosterone-fueled, boorish United States on the catwalk of global diplomacy.

Learning another language will open the door to another culture and enhance your career opportunities in the increasingly global economy...The new language deepens your capacity to communicate and to understand the challenges of all cross-cultural relations.

On the first day of 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao published an essay on culture in a...The language, lifted from Hu's speech at a party plenum on "promoting culture" in October last year, has been interpreted as largely hostile toward the "west" and its machinations to divide China.

Today the entire public diplomacy budget is reportedly of the order of magnitude of what a medium-to-large Israeli corporation spends on promoting fast-food or snacks. If one does not invest in winning hearts and minds, it is no wonder that they are not won.

Mass media, in its different forms, has been used by the State to manufacture consent or create dissent in other countries. The former involves media management, the latter is more in the nature of psychological warfare used in peace time, indeed at all times, as an exercise of soft power.

These days, Soviet-style samizdat is doing the rounds at the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. It is a press release on the letter to Croatian government by Snjezana Pelivan, a Croatian journalist living in Prague.

As part of its efforts to harness digital technologies for public diplomacy, the U.S. State Department has decided to open up its daily press briefings by letting people across the globe tweet their questions in several languages, including Hindi and Urdu.

As part of its initiative to harness more digital technology for diplomacy, the US State Department will be taking questions via Twitter in 10 different languages, and answering them during a press briefing every Friday for the month of January.