French and German cultural action in Brazil in the 1960s and 1960s

Lanoe E (2012) La culture au service de la diplomatie? Les politiques culturelles extérieures de la RFA et de la France au Brésil (1961-1973), PhD, Lille: Universite Charles de Gaulle – Lille III.

 

680 pages of text on French and German cultural relations strategies in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s probably isn’t top of your reading priorities but it if is I’d recommend this, even if you’re not it raises some important points about how to go about analysing public diplomacies.

Lanoe works across France and Germany both at the level of institutional and policy developments at home and at the country level. This allows her to compare perspectives and developments across the two countries as well as between field and HQ. By looking at France and Germany together she’s able to track the way that changes in the Brazilian context, for instance the military coup, generated different responses from France and Germany.

The thesis also underlines some themes that I’ve seen in my research. Public diplomacies aren’t just about the country to country dyad but also about third parties. In the period under consideration France’s position in Brazil was affected by the conflict in Algeria and the activities of Algerian national sympathisers while that of (West) Germany was also influenced by the activities of East Germany. By covering a relatively long time frame it’s also possible to see the partial unwinding of the priority given to the Cold War in West German activities. There’s also an interesting discussion of generational conflicts within the German system where younger Goethe Institute directors chafed against the older central management of the organization and the foreign ministry many of whom had careers dating back to the Nazi era.

Because the thesis is looks at activities on Brazil it adds quite a lot to more general treatments that focus more on what’s happening at home – for instance Kathe (2005) on the Goethe Institut.  I think that this is important because it helps to put the German debate  on Auswärtige Kulturpolitik that unfolded during the 1970s into the context of changing priorities during the previous decade and of real practices.

Kathe SR (2005) Kulturpolitik um Jeden Preis: Die Geschichte des Goethe-Instituts von 1951 bis 1990. Munich: Martin Medienbauer.

You can download Lanoe’s thesis here

The Secret of Public Diplomacy

One of the most stimulating books that I’ve read in the last couple of years was Ray Pawson’s The Science of Evaluation: A Realist Manifesto which is a book about….evaluating policy interventions.

There’s a lot in there but a core idea that recurs is this:

The outcome of a policy intervention is a function of what you do and how you do it in what context.

or to put it another way

Outcome = intervention + implementation + context

There are a lot of implications of this  but here’s four

1. An outcome is not necessarily one you expected or wanted
2. A great idea badly implemented will produce different outcomes from the one you expected even if the context is supportive.
3. An intervention that produced a great outcome in one context may not produce the same outcome in another situation.
4. In the right context a poorly implemented, badly conceived intervention might still produce a desirable outcome. The problem is that the lessons drawn will be that the intervention worked.

In terms of the analysis of public diplomacies a disciplined application of these four categories is very useful.  Much discussion of public diplomacy tends to focus on the design of the intervention ie communications strategy, message, narrative without too much attention to implementation or context.   The analysis of real cases tends to show a different pattern where  interventions are often a function of the context (we must do something!) and the mode of implementation (organizational repertoire) rather than any careful design process. Much more of this at ISA!

More on the Closing Space Problem

I’ve written before about the ‘closing space problem’ where NGOs are faced by restrictive legislation on their operations and especially constraints on foreign funding. There’s an interesting addition to this literature by Jonas Wolff and Annika Elena Poppe which is worth the attention of public diplomacy researchers. They point out that much comment from Northern NGOs and governments tends to assume an unfettered right of freedom of association and an unlimited right to receive foreign funding. In contrast Southern governments tend to call on the norms of sovereignty as the basis for imposing restrictions. While the advocacy literature tends to see these claims as window dressing for political repression they argue that this should be seen as contest over norms: not least because Northern states impose restrictions on foreign funding of political parties. They also argue that donor states ought to take a more nuanced view on the issue, for instance distinguishing between restrictions on foreign funding and broader restrictions on civil society.

I think that this is an interesting issue for students of public diplomacy because the whole normative basis of the practice is rarely explicitly addressed. On one side there is a whole practice of state to state agreements where there is approval given to public diplomacy activities but there is also a strand of Western statecraft that would take the refusal to allow public diplomacy access as invitation to undertake it – based on human rights norms or a broader liberal political theory.

Jonas Wolff and Annika Elna Poppe, From Closing Space to Contested Spaces: Reassessing Current Conflicts over International Civil Society Support (Frankfurt: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, 2015)