On twitter (@rcmb) I often share links about public diplomacy or cultural relations activities between pairs of countries that don’t get much attention in the Anglosphere (or the Eurosphäre to coin a term). But what you get in reading about relations between Indonesia and Cambodia, Belarus and Korea or Iran and Hungary is a sense of very conscious performance of sovereign equality. Countries want to build better relations to boost trade, tourism and show off their cultures.
What’s the big deal? Isn’t everybody about dialogue these days? But from looking at the countries that have been big practitioners of public diplomacies over extended periods this is quite unusual relations imply something much more hierarchical. Although from a diplomatic point of view the language of equality and mutuality is important from an analytical point of view it is only part of the social relations at work. Public diplomacies have been heavily involved in projects of empire building and of ideological export. If PDs were only about the ‘relations between our two countries’ the whole history wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
In thinking about the history of public diplomacies I tend to take the foundation of the Alliance Française in 1883 as reference point. The Alliance was intended to allow the consolidation of French rule in Tunisia. It was modelled on missionary organizations that were already being instrumentalized by the French state as a mode of ‘peaceful penetration’ within the Ottoman Empire. But because the French public preferred to support the export of Catholicism to the French language the Alliance developed along different lines and became more an accoutrement of the Francophile bourgeoisie in other parts of the world. Nevertheless the history of public diplomacies is closely tied to imperial projects, projects that are based on an assumption of hierarchy that one side of a relationship is not just different from the other but better in the sense of more worthy, more advanced, stronger. It’s also worth noting that some of core ideas of egalitarian cultural diplomacy have been traced back to German activities during the First World War. For instance where it was thought that, for instance the Dutch would be more accepting of German arguments if the Germans showed that they were interested in Dutch culture (eg Van Den Berg 2007; Trommler 2014). It was actually the retreat of formal empire that made public diplomacies more important. The public diplomacies of the Cold War and the Post Cold War have had a very large component of ‘exporting our system’. Indeed this imperial/hierarchical paradigm is probably the default position for most of the public diplomacies across the past 150 years.
However, I think that there is a third dimension: it’s about public diplomacies as the export of ideology. It is the ideology that usually justifies imperial behaviour – it is our possession of the truth that places us in a superior position. And it is our possession of a universal truth that justifies our lack of respect for your national sovereignty.
This gives the possibility of arranging cases in a triangular space defined by three axes between hierarchy and equality, Westphalian stateness and universal ideology and between empire and ideology.
The cases that I referred to at the beginning of the post would be near the top of the triangle. Germany before 1914 (imperial and national) would be near the bottom left corner but this really isn’t a very good position for dealing with other people. France has probably been pretty much in the middle of the triangle. Post 1989 the UK has probably moved towards the ideological pole. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution China has moved from the bottom right up and towards the left boundary and while talking Westphalia is probably nearer the bottom.
Thinking in these terms allows us to position public diplomacies in relation to two ideas that have attracted growing interest in academic International Relations in recent years, status and empire.
Trommler, Frank (2014). Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert. Köln: Böhlau-Verlag Gmbh.
Van den Berg, Hubert (2007). “‘The Autonomous Arts as Black Propaganda. On a Secretive Chapter in German “Foreign Cultural Politics” in The Netherlands and Other Neighbouring Countries during the First World War.’” In The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000): A Critical Assessment, edited by G.J. Dorleijn and R. Grüttemeier, 71–119. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.
Public Diplomacy, Networks and Influence 