Michael Goldberg is an American-born academic who moved to Canada in 1968 after competing his doctorate in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He became a Canadian and, eventually, dean of the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. It was during his time as dean that Goldberg was interviewed for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary entitled, “What Border? The Americanization of Canada.” Here is some of what he said:

I think Canada is seen as an honest broker worldwide. We’re not seen as people who play games with geopolitics. We’re seen as a fair, small and honorable people. So it gives us a base for dealing with other people which is a very solid base. In Asia people do business on trust. Canada is seen as trustworthy. That’s a huge advantage. The U.S. is seen as less trustworthy, more bullying, and as a result people prefer to diversity their trade relationships outside the U.S. and Canada is a very logical choice. (CBC 1996)

This is, of course, precisely what the advocates of soft power claim. Admiration, trust, standing, respect, and affection are held to be valuable assets in the world of geopolitics. The representatives of a country whose values and institutions are admired, whose achievements are recognized by others, and whose motives are seen to be fair and honest will find it easier to persuade their foreign interlocutors to act in ways that accord with their country’s interests, values, and preferences. Goldberg refers specifically to the economic advantages that he believed Canadian businesses enjoyed as a result of their country’s positive reputation in Asia. He contrasts this to the United States which, Goldberg claims, compares poorly to Canada in the eyes of Asians—or at least Asian business persons and public officials—when it comes to soft power attributes.

Goldberg may or may not have been correct in claiming that Canada’s image in Asia translated into economic advantages over the United States.¹ Nevertheless, the idea that soft power attributes may have consequences for a country’s dealings with other countries is widely accepted. Although the term “soft power” is of relatively recent vintage, dating from Joseph Nye’s 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Nye 1990), the practice is in fact much older. Governments have long acted in ways premised on their belief that public diplomacy, involving the communication and dissemination of information and images that present their country in a positive light, may help them to achieve their foreign policy goals. Edmund Gullion, one-time dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and one of the early champions of this tool of foreign policy, offered this classic definition of the term,

Public diplomacy…deals with the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy; the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another; the reporting of foreign affairs and its impact on policy; communication between those whose job is communication, as between diplomats and foreign correspondents; and the processes of inter-cultural communications. (quoted in Cull 2006)

Public diplomacy, as conceptualized in Gullian’s definition, may involve a number of state activities. Joseph Nye identifies what he argues are the three main dimensions of public diplomacy: “The first and most immediate dimension is daily communications. The second dimension is strategic communication, which develops a set of simple themes much as a political or advertising campaign does. The third dimension of public diplomacy is the development of lasting relationships with key individuals over many years through scholarships, exchanges, training, seminars, conferences, and access to media channels” (Nye 2010). This third dimension of public diplomacy involves what is generally referred to as cultural diplomacy .

There is a good deal of disagreement over the definition of cultural diplomacy and, therefore, what activities, undertaken by whom, and for what purposes fall under this term (see the discussion in Goff 2017). We accept Richard Arndt’s distinction between, “[c]ultural relations…the relations between national cultures, those aspects of intellect and education lodged in any society that tend to cross borders and connect with foreign institutions. Cultural relations grow naturally and organically, without government intervention,” and cultural diplomacy. The latter, Arndt, argues, “can only be said to take place when formal diplomats, serving national governments, try to shape and channel this natural flow to advance national interests” (Arndt 2005). In his review of the literature on the conceptualization of cultural diplomacy , Tim Rivera quotes a 2014 British Government definition of cultural diplomacy that is similar to Arndt’s and quite succinct: “[Cultural diplomacy involves] the promotion of culture and values to further national interests” (quoted in Tim Rivera 2015: 10).

One might argue that the modern roots of cultural diplomacy began in an important way with the creation of Alliance Française in 1883. However, that organization was the creation of very prominent private individuals and Alliance Française has always operated at arm’s length from the French state, including maintaining its financial independence. Even today, only about 5% of its revenues are received from the state. The British Council, created in 1934 by the British Foreign Office and financed mainly by the state, perhaps deserves to be thought of as the first major endeavor in the field of cultural diplomacy , as we have defined it. The German Goethe-Institut, created in 1951 principally for language training purposes, acquired an important cultural diplomacy role in the early 1970s under the leadership of Ralf Dahrendorf. The German foreign office had declared culture to be a “third pillar” of the country’s foreign policy, expanding the role of the Goethe-Institut in representing German culture abroad. And of course no discussion of twentieth century cultural diplomacy can overlook the extensive activities of the United States government, mainly but not exclusively through the State Department, through such programs as the Voice of America, the Fulbright Program , and the financing of exhibitions and of American artists performing abroad. Much of this effort was driven by the Cold War struggle for the hearts and minds of foreign populations and opinion-leaders.

One of the forms of cultural diplomacy that emerged at the beginning of the Cold War involved government efforts to encourage teaching and research abroad about its country. The prototype and most ambitious of such programs remains the Fulbright Program , created by an act of Congress in 1946. In his book, The Price of Empire, Senator J. William Fulbright explained the importance of these efforts:

Of all the joint ventures in which we might engage, the most productive, in my view, is educational exchange. I have always had great difficulty – since the initiation of the Fulbright scholarships in 1946 – in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign-policy activities. (Fulbright 1989)

The Fulbright Program has always been based on the exchange of scholars, teachers, researchers, and students between the United States and most of the countries of the world. It is a two-way street that provides foreigners, many of whom already are or are expected to become opinion-leaders in their home countries, with the opportunity to come to America and—this has always been the expectation—return with a better understanding of American culture and institutions and a sympathetic appreciation of the United States. It also provides Americans with the opportunity to go abroad to study other countries and, in many cases, give talks, participate in conferences, and give interviews that will provide foreign audiences with information and interpretations of America and also American perspectives on issues. The State Department more recently created another much smaller program, Study of the US Institutes for Scholars (SUSIs), which provides foreign scholars with the opportunity to visit the United States for a period of six weeks. The aims of SUSIs are broadly similar to those of the much larger Fulbright Program . Its stated goal is to, “strengthen curricula and to improve the teaching about the United States in academic institutions abroad” (United States 2017).

Research and teaching about America was already taking place at universities, in research institutes and even in secondary schools in many countries across the world before the Fulbright program was launched. Moreover, intercultural relations at the level of civil society were already quite extensive between the US and many of its allies and major trading partners. But using the definition that we have adopted, this was not, strictly speaking, cultural diplomacy . These activities certainly had implications for how populations and their leaders throughout the world viewed America, but they were not directly promoted by the US government. The Fulbright Program added this element of state sponsorship.

Other countries have followed suit over the years. For example, the Japan Foundation was created in October 1972, associated with the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It has a semi-independent status today, but is still mainly dependent on state money to pay for its extensive activities. These include financing visits to Japan by foreign researchers and teachers, providing grants to Japanese studies associations and centers abroad, and even providing support to such non-Japanese think tanks as the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to study Japan and issues related to Japan (Japan Foundation 2016). In 2015, the Japan Foundation made grants of US$5 million to each of Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University to fund endowed professorships in Japanese politics (Redden 2015). The Korean Foundation, established in 1991, provides support for Korean studies associations and centers abroad, including a grant of $2.5 million in 1997 to fund a chair of Korean studies at the University of Pennsylvania, US$2 million for Stanford in 2005 for an endowed chair, and a grant of more than US$1 million in 2016 to Indiana University at Bloomington to finance their Institute for Korean Studies. Korea has given other grants on this scale to finance Korean studies in the UK and elsewhere. A rather different model has been pioneered by China in recent years. Large donations to universities in the United States, the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, sometimes reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made by wealthy Chinese businesspersons or by foundations that appear to be fronts for individual donors. The very close ties that often exist between these businesspersons and the Chinese state suggest the possibility that such funding is a way for the Chinese government to influence teaching and research on China abroad. In many cases, with the exception of endowed chairs, the donations are not tied to the study of China. But in some cases they are (see Sharma 2016).

Canada has never played in this league. Nevertheless, for roughly 40 years, the Government of Canada operated a rather modest program of cultural diplomacy that included financial support for Canadian studies abroad. It appeared to have played an important role in encouraging the proliferation of Canadian studies associations in countries across the world, as well as an increase in the number and activities of centers and programs for Canadian studies abroad. An important part of this program involved financing foreign academics, researchers, and students who wished to visit Canada for purposes relating to their research or teaching. Despite the rather small sums of money spent on this program—its annual budget never rose much above about US$4 million—and the fact that it was judged by a number of evaluations to be quite cost-effective, it was terminated in 2012.

Although this Canadian government support was ended, Canadian studies abroad have continued. Indeed, as the subsequent chapters explain, Canadian studies abroad preceded the financial encouragement of the Canadian government and will doubtless continue without this support. Nevertheless, the impact of the 2012 decision has not been insignificant, affecting Canadian studies in some countries more than in others. Moreover, there is the question of why, at a moment in history when some of the world’s countries were increasing their investment in cultural diplomacy and others, such as the United States, were at least holding steady,² the Canadian government would decide to turn its back on this tool of soft power. How and why the Canadian government came to embrace Canadian studies abroad as a tool of cultural diplomacy , and why it terminated this support in 2012, is the story of this chapter.