Personal Prestige and National Reputation: Louis XIV, Berlusconi and the Queen

The origins of contemporary public diplomacy lie in the at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the expansion of national governments  and the rise of national sentiments.  Yet the concern with reputation and prestige as elements of  influence  were permanent aspects of international politics, see for instance Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hans Morgenthau’s discussion of the ‘policy of prestige’ in Politics Among Nation  or Peter Burke’s  The Fabrication of Louis XIV.  Burke documents in meticulous detail Louis’s efforts use spectacle, public art, support for artists and intellectuals, architecture to construct his own image and secure his power domestically and project it internationally.  He shows how the model of the court at Versailles was copied by other monarchs.

While today shaping the image of national leaders is normally thought of as an aspect of domestic politics for some countries the image of the leader is an important part of their international reputation. The rise in international opinion of the United States with the election of Barack Obama and this morning’s news that Far Eastern financial markets are rising on the news that Silvio Berlusconi is going to resign as Italy’s prime minister.  For many countries who leads them will have little significance while for others the reputation of the leader may significantly help or hinder the image of the nation.

What initially stimulated this line of thought was the meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government at the end of October. The Commonwealth is the organization of former British colonies and today is committed to the promotion of good governance and development.  From a UK point of view it provides an additional set of opportunities to promote policies and build relationships.  Also a significant number of these countries have the British monarch as their head of state, for instance Canada and Australia.  The question that occurred to me is the extent to which these post-imperial relationships are actually tied to the person of Queen Elizabeth the Second rather than to the institutions of the British Monarchy or state. The vast majority of citizens of the Commonwealth have known no other Monarch (it’s not the Olympics that is the big event in the UK next year it’s the anniversary of Elizabeth’s 60 years on the throne).  Prince Charles lacks the personal prestige of Elizabeth (of course this may be because he’s not the king) and there are recurrent stories that it is the personal respect for Elizabeth that maintains the position of the monarchy in Australia and Canada, it’s Elizabeth that actually reigned over the independence of most British colonies.

While the Royal Family is usually identified as an important component of how people outside the UK think about the country there are actually interesting questions to be asked around the role of the Royal Family and the Queen as a diplomatic resource.  Asking the question marks a continuity in the role of leadership in building the image of the state.

Where’s My PD Networks!

This blog would like to apologize for the lack of content. Apart from the disruption caused by moving we still don’t have an internet connection (or TV or telephone)  at home.

Anyway David Cameron appears to be embarking on a one man effort to rebrand Britain.  I haven’t seen any preparation for this so I expect that the impact will be negligible.  One of the basic ideas in nation-branding is that you have to get the domestic side of the operation on side and I can guarantee that he’s going to get nothing but sarcasm from the UK on this.  There’s a (doubtless inaccurate) story from The Telegraph here plus a conversation with Mark Leonard of Cool Britannia associations and advertising man Dave Trott here.  Keep in mind that Leonard is a Labour supporter. The interesting nugget in The Telegraph piece is that the idea for the campaign is believed to have come from Cameron’s Director of Strategy Steve Hilton who has a reputation for not quality controlling his ideas.

Evidence on Perceptions and Foreign Investment

Does nation branding have economic significance? Via Nation Branding we learn of a German study that claims that a one point rise in your score on the Anholt Nation Brands index leads to a 27% increase in foreign direct investment. This sounded a bit too good to be true so I’ve tracked down the published version of the research.

Kalamova and Konrad are interested in the impact of investor perceptions on FDI decisions relative to economic fundamentals. They look at FDI flows and statistically test the extent to which these patterns can be explained by standard economic models and by the impact of perceptions. They find that a one point rise in your NBI score is associated with a 27% greater FDI flow above what would be predicted by the standard economic model. I think that this is an important qualification – the article is not saying that a 1 point increase in perceptions will make your flow 27% regardless of everything else. This relationship is statistically significant at the 1% level which implies a very strong association.

I’m convinced that perceptions do matter but I’m a bit sceptical about the size of the effect. FDI flows tend to be quite volatile and for smaller countries single investment decisions can have a big impact on the overall figures. For this reason it would be really helpful to have the study extended to cover more than two years. It’s also worth emphasizing Anholt’s point that the NBI is measuring a whole set of factors including things like governance and economic conditions so an improvement in NBI is assumed to be based on more than nation-branding as advertising.

Kalamova, M.M., and K.A. Konrad (2010) ‘Nation Brands and Foreign Direct Investment’, Kyklos, 63: 400-31.

Air Travel and the National Brand: The Soviet Tyler Brule

Tyler Brule the editor of Monocle magazine and FT columnist travels around the world and then writes columns arguing that your airport is your opportunity to communicate your national brand to visitors as soon as they arrive. Of course what a lot of airports communicate is ‘we’re rubbish and we don’t care about you’

Here’s an example

You might think I’ve rocked up in some shambolic banana republic or poorly managed police state, but I’m actually at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport late on a Sunday afternoon. As I’m about to walk up to the booth for inspection, a voice booms over the public address system with an urgent bulletin – “Attention all officers, attention all officers, anyone who has not signed up for overtime today, I repeat, anyone who did not sign up for overtime can now leave their post”. In a flash a series of officers pack up their stamps and take their super-size slurpy cups and waddle off duty. The 1,000-plus people in line just stare in amazement.

As I approach the desk, I feel like giving the young gentleman a lecture about how bad this whole performance is for Brand USA – particularly on top of a whole week of television reports about the new fee that visitors will have to pay to get a visa and how these funds will be used to create a campaign to encourage more tourism to the US. I want to ask him if he (and his bosses not far away in the District of Columbia) think a 90-minute wait in a dumpy airport is any way to welcome the world and if his department is really that interested in having people visit the US.

In reading Rosa Magnusdottir’s chapter on Soviet cultural diplomacy towards the US I came across this discussion of the role of the state airline Aeroflot as a gateway to the USSR. Boris Polevoi was a Soviet journalist who led a delegation to the USA in 1955.

Polevoi described the flight delays as outrageous and the crew of flight attendants as completely incompetent: ‘They do not know languages, do not offer passengers newspapers or magazines, and do not pay any attention to the passengers…breakfast was served without napkins, straight from a box. The food was cold, two days old, had been prepared and brought in from Moscow and was dried up.’ It got worse; passengers who wanted an extra cup of tea were told by the ‘misses’ that they would have to pay for he extra sugar tea themselves because only ‘two pieces of sugar were allocated per passenger’ (emphasis in original) were allocated by headquarters.. This is odd but it is a fact’….Noting the increasing numbers of tourists visiting the Soviet Union, Polevoi warned that the lack of service had the potential to cause the Soviet image ‘serious even political damage’.

Of course Aeroflot didn’t get any better but it’s interesting to see the link between air travel and national brand being made in the Soviet Union.

Magnusdottir, R. (2010) ‘Mission Impossible?: Selling Soviet Socialism to Americans, 1955-1958′, pp. 50-72 in J. Gienow-Hecht and M.C. Donfried (eds) Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Berghahn.

Strategic Communications and the Crisis of Strategy

Last week Abu Muquwama had a justifiably scathing post  on the absence of strategy in the Libyan intervention.  He links to an article by the British military historian  Hew Strachan (2010) on Obama’s dismissal of Stanley McChrystal.  Strachan sees McChrystal’s comments about the administration as deriving from a frustration with lack of clarity over the strategy for Afghanistan.

Strachan has been arguing for some time (eg 2005) that Anglo-American  policy  has suffered from what might be called  a ‘strategy gap’:  that is a break in the ends-means chain that links political intent to military action.  A symptom of this is the tendency to use military force without a clearly defined end state in mind or a clear sense of how military force can be used to achieve this end state.  Strachan locates the source of this difficulty in the expansion of the concept of strategy in the context of total war and the Cold War this expansion broke the clear relationship between the  military and political dimensions of strategy.  The result is a political leadership who fail to provide proper policy guidance and a military who have to make something up to fill the gap.   From the military side of the ‘gap’ the concept of the ‘operational’ level or ‘operational art’ have expanded to partially fill the gap.*

There’s an interesting  a parallel with the rise of strategic communication .  I’ve commented before about the way that strategic communication has expanded from a military priority into something that demands the coordination of national level communications and actions.  The expansion of  strategic communication grows out of the recognition that things that are said or done in one place (or by one agency) have effects elsewhere.  It also creates an emphasis on how to do things  not what to do or why.  The expansion of strategic communication both in the UK and in the US has a bias towards the military and security issues.

This has grown out of the perceived requirements of the war on terror but hasn’t been accompanied by efforts to think through national level communication policy.    National level communications strategies have to grow out of a comprehensive view of national priorities (including civilian concerns like investments, tourism and trade)  which in turn places a limit on strategic communications as a set of techniques.   Perhaps what is required is an effort to synthesize the concerns of nation-branding with its  emphasis on generalized reputation and typically civilian concerns with strategic communications

* Of course the great practitioners of ‘the operational’  in both world wars were the Germans who consistently demonstrated their brilliance at operations and their ineptness at strategy.

 

Strachan, H. (2005) ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival, 47: 33-54.

Strachan, H. (2010) ‘Strategy or Alibi? Obama, McChrystal and the Operational Level of War’, Survival, 52: 157-.

Switzerland Trying to Change its Image…

Seems like nobody is really happy with their image – we think that that people think that we’re just a heritage theme park, the Canadians don’t like to be thought of as living in the Arctic..and   The Swiss aren’t happy that we only go there for the mountains.  Now they want to convince us to go for city breaks as well.  A shorter version of this clip is running on UK TV at the moment.

Was There a Cool Britannia Campaign?

It’s becoming conventional wisdom within Public Diplomacy Studies that after coming to power in 1997 Tony Blair’s  new Labour government launched an effort to rebrand the UK as Cool Britannia and that this campaign was a disastrous failure  -  Laura McGinnis labels it as the Waterworld of nation branding.

Over the past few months I’ve become increasingly sceptical about this idea.  I’ve been looking at writings that make this claim and looking for references to primary source materials – I’m not seeing them.   So in part this post is a challenge.  If there was a campaign who ran it?  Where did the budget come from? What were its objectives – do we have any campaign planning documents?  Any information on visual identity?  I haven’t come across any of this material and in it’s absence I find it difficult to believe there was a systematic campaign.

If there was no campaign why do we think that there was one?

I think that the story of Cool Britannia come from the retrospective conflation of two developments.  Firstly, Cool Britannia as a media narrative particularly associated with the writings of Stryker McGuire of Newsweek in 1996-97.  This played into the narrative of modernity promoted by the Blair government who exploited  (it I think  for domestic purposes) through stunts like inviting Britpop bad boys Oasis to 10 Downing Street and appointing the head of their record label as a government advisor.  Predictably this attempt to align the government with rock and roll and modern art created a backlash both from sceptics and from the efforts of artists to avoid cooptation.

The second development was the growing interest in nation branding and the possibility of using a nation branding effort to re-shape the image of the UK.   The Design Council – the quasi governmental body that supports the design industry in the UK had commissioned a study New Brand for a New Britain.   The involvement of the Design Council  indicated the growing interest in creative industries in the UK – the recognition that activities like design,  advertising, media, marketing, the arts are actually big chunks of the UK economy.   The Design Council report was published as Blair came into power and in turn led to the commissioning of more research from Demos the prototypical new Labour think tank.  This was Mark Leonard’s BritainTM: Renewing Our Identity which attracted quite a lot of interest. Leonard left Demos to lead a new think tank the Foreign Policy Centre – again tightly aligned to the Labour Party and which produced a paper by Wally Olins on branding, Trading Identities in 1999 and a  series of reports on Public Diplomacy starting in 2000.

Ok – so there was media discourse about Cool Britannia that drew in bits of the government, there was a growing interest in (and controversy around) nation branding but what about the UK PD machinery?

The governmental response to this interest was the creation in 1997 of an  FCO advisory group  Panel 2000 (with Mark Leonard as member) with the brief

to produce a strategy to improve the way Britain is seen overseas;

to look at the methods and tools available to do this;

to make sure that the public and private sectors are working together to do this; and

to modernise the way the FCO  communicates with the public

Apart from Leonard the membership of the panel was drawn in part from the private sector but also included the new Labour communications guru Peter Mandelson.   Panel 2000 begat the Britain Abroad Task Force which began it’s work at the beginning of 2001 and was intended to develop better coordination between the various bits of government concerned with the projection of Britain. Around this time the British Council was conducting research on the perception of Britain under the label Through Others Eyes.   I get the impression that all of  this work was proceeding without any urgency -  certainly it wasn’t running a campaign.

September 11 changed the game.  In quick succession we get the Wilton and Carter reviews of Public Diplomacy which are conducted rapidly by much smaller groups and which produced reorganizations  and the UK PD discourse swings from general concerns with image to towards more political matters.  Interestingly if you look at more recent PD UK documents where there are general discussions of the UK image the themes are not a million miles from those identified in Leonard’s 1997 report.

The myth of the Cool Britannia campaign comes from the government buying into a media narrative which predictably blew up in its face (eg Jarvis Cocker of  the band Pulp commenting that Labour were worse than the Tories) .  In parallel the policy community was exploring ideas of nation branding. What connected these developments was new  Labour’s interest in questions of image and creative industries but there was no systematic rebranding campaign.   If anyone knows better please let me know.

Anglo-American Youtube Diplomacy: Work in Progress

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter I keep finding links to new MFA videos clicking on them and wondering  what the point is…

Partly my reaction is driven by the view that web video is an incredibly inefficient way of communication mostly you could describe the content in a paragraph that could be read in a fraction of the time that it takes to watch the video.  Also public diplomacy researchers are not the key audience for PD video so what I think is not that important.

Anyway here are a couple of examples that I found in the inbox in the last few hours.  First Up the US-European Media Hub in Brussels.  Its Facebook page describes it thus

The U.S.- European Media Hub connects journalists in and around Europe with access to U.S. policymakers and perspectives. The Hub is part of the International Media Engagement Office of the U.S. Department of State.

Their Youtube channel is here.    This has a lot of very serious talking head  videos about issues such as the role of the American Chambers of Commerce – some of which have accumulated as much as 45 views in a month.   This triggers a few thoughts.

1. Who are you trying to communicate with?  The people that are interested in some of these issues are not going to learn anything from these videos and there’s nothing to draw in people who aren’t interested.
2. How much does it cost to produce this material?  It maybe that it’s so cheap that the opportunity cost of production is so low that you might as well make them as not..but if there is a resource implication is this the best use of resources?
3. The usual constraint of web activity applies how do you attract attention? I happen to follow the US Embassy in London on Twitter and so got the link but what if you don’t.

Over at the Foreign Office they are busy with their Olympics Campaign and Jimmy Leach the head of Digital Engagement tweeted a link to this Celebrating Britain video yesterday if you looked at the Olympics PD plan you will see some of the themes about connection coming out – also see the words that flash on the screen – ideas that you are supposed to take away.

Three  thoughts about this one.

1) Firstly, the video could be shorter and sharper (it’s actually a compilation of other films) – it’s not as if we don’t make lots of pop videos.

2) it faces the usual problem of UK branding, the tension between well established perceptions of the UK as a conservative country with a long history and the desire of government to make it look modern, cosmopolitan, connected, creative and high tech.

3) This is very much outward facing communication – one of the rules of nation branding is that you need to get buy in from the population and  its probably best that this doesn’t get too many views from the UK so that the comments don’t fill up with sarcastic comments.

The FCO produces quite a lot videos of various types -  their channel is here

I’ve seen this somewhere….

In 1937 Kingsley Martin visited the Paris Exhibition and described the British Pavilion

When you went in, the first thing you saw was a cardboard [Neville] Chamberlain fishing in rubber waders and, beyond, an elegant pattern of golf balls, a frieze of tennis rackets, polo sets, riding equipment, natty dinner jackets and, by a pleasant transition, agreeable pottery and textiles, books finely printed and photographs of the English countryside.

I read this and instantly had a mental picture of a Ralph Lauren store….

Quote from Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 122

US Public Diplomacy: What Problem? Part 2

Following up on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK’s attribution of the upheavals in the Middle East to US PD2.0

Given the amount of time that the PD blogosphere spends agonizing about the state of US PD and soft power it might be worth adding that  the US is number 1 in the Nation Brands Index, it’s number 4 in the Country Brand Index.  In the Pew Global Attitudes responses are up around the world…

Maybe the scale of the problems isn’t that big.