EH Carr and the Realist Theory of Propaganda

I ‘accidentally’ bought a pamphlet by EH Carr, Propaganda in International Politics published in 1939 without realizing that this this was actually extracted from the first (1939) edition of The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939.* Generations of International Relations students have read the second (1946) edition as one of the founding texts of realist international relations theory.  I remember being told as an undergraduate the chief difference the two editions was that in 1939 Hitler was still ‘Herr Hitler’ but from a quick comparison between the pamphlet and my copy of the second edition Carr seems to have toned down how he expresses his argument even if the basic direction remains unchanged.

Carr argues for the close association between ‘power over opinion’ and military and economic power.  The impact of ideas is tied to their promotion by states  – which in turn reflects interests.  Carr is dismissive of the power of ideas that are not supported by states.  For him the failure of the League of Nations and its belief in the power of ‘international public opinion’ is the ‘best modern illustration’  of the fact that propaganda ‘is ineffective as a political force until it acquires a national home and becomes linked with military and economic power’.

It is an illusion to suppose that if Great Britain (or Germany or Soviet Russia) were disarmed or militarily weak, British (or German or Soviet) propaganda might still be effective in virtue of the inherent excellence of its content.

The almost universal belief in the merits of democracy which spread over the world in 1918 was due less to the inherent excellence of democracy or of  the propaganda on its behalf than to the victory of the Allied armies and the Allied blockade.  Had the Bolshevik regime collapsed in 1919, far fewer people would today be convinced of the merits of Marxism.  If Germany is defeated in the present war, little more will be heard of the ideological merits of National Socialism.

But this isn’t the whole story

Propaganda to be successful must appeal to some universally or generally recognized values….Every country seeks to place its policy on an ethical basis, even if this can only be done by asserting that it has a historical mission to rule over inferior races for their own good.  Whatever the policy the need to clothe it in some altruistic guise is universally felt.

No national policy is disinterested, and no country can justly identify its own welfare with the welfare of the world as a whole. But some countries in the pursuit of their ends show more consideration than others for the rights and interests of the rest of the world.  In so far as they do so, they are entitled to claim that their policy is more moral: and their international propaganda, resting on this basis is likely to prove  more effective than that of their rivals

Three  thoughts:

What struck me in reading this was the question of the extent to which ‘power over opinion’ can be thought of as being an autonomous source of influence in international politics.  Carr is concerned to attack the idea that public opinion operates independently of other sources of power but at the same time he does recognize that ‘power over opinion’ has some force distinct from military or economic power.

Seventy years later can we argue that power of opinion has become more autonomous?  The standard view is that political change and a new media environment has produced this effect.  On the other hand I think that it would be a mistake to overstate the autonomy of power over opinion from other factors.   We wouldn’t be debating ‘Chinese  soft power’ if the Chinese economy was not as large as it is. The ability of the EU or the US to effectively promote its ideas will not be helped by the reality and perception of decline.

As with most writing from International Relations on propaganda or public diplomacy Carr is actually vague on the mechanisms by which power over opinion operates.

In a later post I’ll raise the question of what public diplomacy studies can learn from realism.

*Fortunately I only paid £3 (but the original price of the pamphlet was 3 pre-decimal pennies , there were 240 old pennies to the pound so ignoring inflation I paid 240 times the original price….)

Carr, E.H. (1939) Propaganda in International Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Carr, E.H. (1946) The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.

The Public Diplomacy Challenge for Rising Powers

There’s quite an active debate in China about soft power and the public diplomacy requirements of being a rising power (eg Ding 2008) so I was really interested by this New York Times story about negative regional reactions to the rise of Brazil.  Brazil is seen, in some quarters at least, as using its financial resources to finance infrastructure projects that threaten national sovereignty in Argentina, Bolivia. Guyana, Peru.  The article quotes a Bolivian politician: ‘just as China consolidates regional hegemony in Asia, Brazil wants to do the same in Latin America.’  There’s scope for an interesting comparative study here.

I’ve always  liked Choucri and North’s (1975) idea that rising powers exert ‘lateral pressure’ . Economic and demographic growth generates a search for resources and opportunities, which in turn create new political interests.  Economic growth provides new resources for military spending with the effect that the frictions over investments and access and resources become security issues. For the neighbours the combination of a pattern of conflicts combined with expanding military resources mark the rising power as a problem.  What I like about lateral pressure is the implication that it is a natural consequence of growth rather than something that is planned.   The implication of this is that the process of an ‘antagonizing’ is piecemeal.  It’s not something that governments plan to do and may derive from actions that are nothing to do with government.  Choucri and North based their model of conflict on the period before 1914 and I think that in thinking about the current international system this is an interesting period to keep in mind with its combination of rising powers and popular nationalism mediated through interacting national media systems that tended to magnify international issues (eg Hale 1940, 1971)

Rising powers tend find it difficult to recognize their impact on their neighbours and hence to manage the situation diplomatically.  One source of this is the conviction that what’s good for  them is also for the neighbours.  The kind of infrastructure projects discussed in the NYT article are good for some of the people in the neighbouring states but also create losers and opponents who can then harness the power of nationalism against the project.   Where the exuberance of growth is coupled with a sense of grievance or entitlement then the propensity to overlook or overreact to negative reactions is reinforced.   In the Brazil case some of these conflicts are more internal to the neighbouring states but still have an impact on international relationships.

From a public diplomacy( and a broader diplomatic)  perspective rising powers need to understand that negative reactions are not just about misperceptions or a sense of a military threat.  These reactions are rooted in objective changes generated by the process of growth which need to be managed regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation

Choucri, N., and R.C. North (1975) Nations in Conflict: National Growth and International Violence. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co.

Ding, S. (2008) The Dragon’s Hidden Wings: How China Rises with Its Soft Power. Lexington Books.

Hale, O.J. (1940) Publicity and Diplomacy. New York: Appleton Century.

Hale, O.J. (1971) Germany and the Diplomatic Revolution: a Study in Diplomacy and the Press, 1904-1906. Octagon Books.

Soft Power and Hegemony

Yelena Osipova at Global Chaos has been thinking about soft power and hegemony and she asked me what I thought.  A few slightly random thoughts.

• Joe Nye’s writings on soft power need to be read as a series of policy interventions rather than  the unfolding of a theoretical project.  The adoption of soft power in policy discourses around the world is  due to the ambiguities of the concept rather than its clarity.  The corollary of this is researchers should be cautious about using the concept as the basis for academic analysis.
• One of my problems with ‘soft power’ is the way that is the conceptual distinction that it draws with ‘hard power’ (which in turn leads to the question of where this boundary is drawn).  In the older International Relations literature the key boundary distinction is between power and force which allows the discussion of ‘power’ without the arbitrary between hard and soft distinction. (There is something of a cottage industry in showing that soft is really hard and hard is really soft – see some of the contributions to Berenskoetter and Williams and Parmar and Cox)  Thomas Schelling’s writings on compellence  even draw the distinction between ‘war’ and the coercive use of force so that dropping bombs on people actually remains within the realm of power. The hard/soft distinction also tends to obscure the centrality of negotiation and bargaining  and hence exchange within the international realm.
• I think that the  way that Gramscian conceptualizations of hegemony refuse the hard/soft distinction is very useful. Hegemony  combines coercion, resource distribution and the impact of ideolog and involves an element of consent.  It then becomes possible to examine the extent to which different elements of these combinations change.
• The question that remains is how hegemony can be constructed both in general and in the contemporary international order.  A successfully consolidated hegemonic position will look normal and inevitable.  From an analytical point of view failed attempts at hegemony and challenges to a hegemonic position are  informative about the difficulties at work.  It could also be argued that when Gramsci (like all the early 20th c. Marxists) had to explain the absence of revolution in the developed capitalist countries he was starting from a position where the workers were expected to revolt and if he was overestimating the propensity to socialist revolution he would then have to overestimate what was necessary to prevent it.
• The popularity of ‘hegemony’ in cultural and communications studies sometimes leads to downplaying of the coercive and economic bases of the concept.  This leads to a tendency to see hegemony as purely being about ideas/ideology.

There is a more fundamental question about the role of the concept of ‘power’ in the analysis of international politics: simply has it become a red herring taking more attention that is really worth? But that’s a subject for a later post.

Berenskoetter, F., and M.J. Williams (2007) Power in World Politics. New edition. Routledge.

Parmar, I., and M. Cox, eds. (2010) Soft power and US Foreign Policy : Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary perspectives. London ;;New York: Routledge.

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.

British Council Corporate Plan 2011-15

Talking about the British Council as I was earlier I thought that I would check whether their new corporate plan had appeared- and here it is on the website.  I can’t tell when it appeared and there doesn’t seem to have been any media coverage.  As with a lot of these documents it probably needs to be read in conjunction with the annual reports and the previous plan.

Studies of India and Indian Public Diplomacy

Between the approach of the new semester here and moving house I haven’t had much time to blog but having a bit of a lull for a few minutes..

The other day somebody tweeted a link to the news that the Indian Council for Cultural Relations was setting up a Chair in Contemporary Indian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.   A couple of days ago there was a reference to the Australian prime minister setting up a chair of Australian studies in Beijing.

Promoting the academic study of your country is a venerable public diplomacy tool and one that hasn’t attracted much academic attention with partial exception of American and Canadian studies.  During the Cold War the promotion of American Studies was one tool in the US PD armoury although it now appears to be one that has fallen out of favour so it’s interesting to see what other countries are up to.

As a result I had a dig into what the ICCR was up to.   The Edinburgh Chair  is part of a broader strategy by the Council to develop academic study of India.  A list on the ICCR website identifies 73 posts in 52 countries.

The council uses a model of concluding an agreement with foreign universities under which they host an Indian academic whose salary is paid by the ICCR while the University meets other costs such as health insurance.  This presumably makes hosting one of the Indian chairs quite attractive to the University and gives the Council a high level of control about where these chairs go.  On the other hand it’s quite a costly model for the council.

Evan Potter’s Branding Canada provides a useful summary of Canada’s ‘studies’ programme.  This  has tried to develop the study of Canada by foreign academics in their own countries with the Canadian government supplying much more limited levels of financial support than the Indian approach but also trying to catalyse the development of networks and organizations devoted to the study of Canada.

Potter  sees the development of Canadian Studies as one of the most valuable tools in the arsenal by creating a network of ‘trusted intermediaries’ who are able to explain Canada to their home countries and he gives examples of cases where foreign academics have been able to play significant roles.  At the same time he points to the dangers of too much culture – at points Canadian Studies has been in danger of becoming a literature oriented areas studies ghetto – as result he argues for incorporating Canadian issues into other academic fields.  One success that Potter identifies is in positioning Canada as a strong source of expertise on federalism.   You could argue that India could learn quite a lot from the Canadian model of trying to catalyse foreign studies – as a rising power India will attract increasing attention and it would make sense to build links with that developing field.

The House of Lords Debates Soft Power

I’m beginning to find that whenever I see anything written on soft power my brain switches off.   I’m really not sure whether it’s worth the effort to try and process the information into something  that makes any sense.  I think that the basic problem I have with the idea is that leads to endless debates about categories: is that soft power or is it something else?  Is soft power really hard power or is hard power really soft power? (I’m also fed up with the influence vs power discussion).   I will eventually get around to posting my argument that we’re better off thinking in terms of influence.

BUT….because soft power is so well entrenched in policy circles it looks like I’m going to have to carry on  jabbing myself in the leg with a fork to make myself pay attention.. what triggered this is that I’ve just noticed that the House of Lords actually had a debate on the coordination of UK soft power at the beginning of May. It’s all quite sensible.   There’s a link to the transcript and a briefing note here.*

There’s actually been a review of UK soft power strategy which has apparently now been completed but I’ve yet to see anything published about it.  The monthly updates on the FCO business plan reports that the development of a soft power strategy for Afghanistan is running behind schedule.

*One pedantic academic point: Lord Howell claims credit for introducing ‘cultural diplomacy’ into UK discourse when he was  on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in the mid 1980s.  From looking at the records of parliamentary debates and parliamentary papers – which include budgetary issues you can see  that cultural diplomacy has never been that common a term in the UK.  There was a flurry of usage in the late 197os (it was very rare before this) and at the time of the FAC Cultural Diplomacy report in 1986 but because the FCO talks about information work or public diplomacy and the British Council does cultural relations cultural diplomacy has never really caught on as an idea in the UK

More on Chinese Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

My colleague Gary Rawnsley was asked to prepare a statement on Chinese public diplomacy activities  for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission he’s posted the text on his blog here.

Shanthi Kalathil at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown has just put out a paper reconsidering the state of Chinese soft power.

Public Diplomacy/Soft Power Papers from ISA 2011

I’m flying back from Montreal today.  As well as pre-conference working group on public diplomacy there is a growing interest in PD.  Over the next few days I will post some comments and thoughts on the state of the field.  In the mean time I’m posting links to a selection of papers on PD and related topics that have been posted to the online conference archive.  This list isn’t complete and I will add to it in due course.  There are a number of interesting papers that haven’t been posted yet and some of the most interesting discussions occurred in roundtables that don’t require written papers.

Note – I’ve put these up quickly and I haven’t had a chance to check all the links yet – for links that take you to a page where you can click to view online you can go to the link to Allacademic at the bottom of the page and get a pdf.

 

Public Diplomacy and Prosumption: Limitations and Contradictions of U.S. Web 2.0 Engagement Activities

Edward A. Comor: University of Western Ontario

Diplomacy Action in the Age of Networks: the Agency Debate

John Robert Kelley: American University

Religious Transnational Actors and Soft Power

Jeffrey P. Haynes: London Metropolitan University

EU Public Diplomacy: A Coherent Message?

Mai’a Keapuolani Davis Cross: University of Southern California

City Diplomacy in the EU Context

Teresa La Porte: University of Navarra

Within the European Union: New Members’ Public Diplomacy

Beata Ociepka: University of Wroclaw

The Implicit Becomes Explicit? The EAAS and Public Diplomacy

Simon W Duke: EIPA

Exploring Diaspora Diplomacy through the Case of US Public Diplomacy toward Lebanon

Deborah L. Trent: George Washington University

Domestic Face of Public Diplomacy

Jana Peterkova: University of Economics, Prague

Introducing Corporate Political Activity as a Part of Business Diplomacy

Jennifer Kesteleyn: Ghent University

International Persuasion, Teleological Identities, and Pragmatics

Sanjoy Banerjee: San Francisco State University

Reporting the Nation: Understanding the Role of Journalism in 21st Century Public Diplomacy

Cristina Archetti: University of Salford

Hearts and Minds’ vs. Heads on the Block: Winning Domestic Support for King Henry VIII’s Divorce Diplomacy with Pope Clement VII

Geoffrey Allen Pigman: Bennington College

Practices of Public Diplomacy in Communicating NATO and EU Values with the Domestic Public in Croatia

Suzana Simichen Sopta: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration, Iva A. Tarle: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Croatia, Mladen Andrlic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration, Croatia

Securing the State through Dialogue at Home: The Bringing Foreign Policy Home Initiative: Pakistan Outreach

Caroline Clennell‐Jaine: South Asia Group, Steven Curtis: London Metropolitan University

Comparing the Soft Power and Public Diplomacy Capacity of China and Taiwan

Gary Rawnsley : University of Leeds

Public Diplomacy as Social Networking

Robin Brown: University of Leeds

The Foreign Office and Soft Power

When the Coalition government came to power in the UK the Foreign Office got some new objectives including ‘develop a soft power strategy for Afghanistan’  as I commented at the time it might help if they explained what they thought soft power was.  I’ve been reading a document that the FCO submitted to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in December last year (it’s the pages from 74 to 113 according to the page numbers on the document/ 76-115 according to the pdf pagination) and this gives a few clues

Use ‘soft power’ to promote British values, advance development and prevent conflict. Use ‘soft power’ as a tool of UK foreign policy; expand the UK Government’s contribution to conflict prevention; promote British values, including human rights; and contribute to the welfare of developing countries. (p.76)

So the first part of this says that soft power is a tool but the part after the semicolon is ambiguous – are we talking about tools or objectives?

On page 86 the paper refers to ‘defence diplomacy and the projection of defence soft power’  on the following page we learn that ‘the FCO participates in a number of Key MoD [Ministry of Defence] engagement planning committees’.  There’s a summary of what defence diplomacy means in the UK lexicon here.

The other place where Soft Power appears is on page 97 where we get this:

As set out in the FCO Business Plan, we will work with other government departments to agree a joint approach to enhance British “soft power” that uses all our national instruments, including the UK’s world-class programme of aid.
In his appearance in front of the Liaison Committee in November 2010, the Prime Minister said that “we should be clear that the development budget gives Britain clout and influence in the world. Six months into the job, I really feel that. When you sit round the table at the G8 or G20 discussing Haiti, Pakistan or Yemen, often the modern equivalent of a battleship is the C17 loaded with aid and the brilliant Oxfam team that is going to go in and help deliver water or whatever. They are real tools of foreign policy and influence and heft in the world. We should be quite frank about that, and not be embarrassed about it”.

I’m surprised that I missed this at the time because the explicit embrace of aid as a tool of policy is very different from the normal British approach   Under the last government implying that aid was at all instrumental was a definite no no. This line sounds almost…..French?  The other question that comes to mind is who is being influenced here is it the people in Haiti or Pakistan or is it the other members of the G20?

The interesting thing is that idea of soft power isn’t used in discussing some areas that you would expect it to be used for eg education, health, culture.  So what we have here is the view that soft power is a foreign policy instrument particularly in relation to the use of aid and defence diplomacy.  It’s not used, in this document at least, in the way that Nye would use it in relation to attraction.

Incidentally pages 233 onwards of the .pdf include a lot material on staffing practice in the FCO – worth looking at if you’re interested in what capabilities diplomats are supposed to have and which embassies and consulates are regarded as hardship postings.