New Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century

James Pamment

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136219535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the concept of new public diplomacy against empirical data derived from three country case studies, in order to offer a systematic assessment of policy and practice in the early 21st century.

The new public diplomacy (PD) is a major paradigm shift in international political communication. Globalisation and a new media landscape challenge traditional foreign ministry 'gatekeeper' structures, and foreign ministries can no longer lay claim to being sole or dominant actors in communicating foreign policy. This demands new ways of elucidating foreign policy to a range of nongovernmental international actors, and new ways of evaluating the influence of these communicative efforts.

The author investigates the methods and strategies used by five foreign ministries and cultural institutes in three countries as they attempt to adapt their PD practices to the demands of the new public diplomacy environment. Drawing upon case studies of US, British, and Swedish efforts, each chapter covers national policy, current activities, evaluation methods, and examples of individual campaigns.

This book will be of much interest to students of public diplomacy, foreign policy, political communication, media studies and international relations in general.

1Introduction

Public diplomacy is the communication of an international actor’s policies to citizens of foreign countries. These citizens might include civil society representatives, non-governmental organisations, multinationals, journalists and media institutions, specialists across different sectors of industry, politics and culture and members of the general public. They are typically engaged by actors like foreign ministries, non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations through communication methods such as media outreach, conferences and events, collaborative projects and exchanges of culture, personnel or students. If diplomacy is the ‘management of change’ in the international environment through engagement with foreign governments, public diplomacy is the management of that changing environment through engagement with public actors.¹ At its core lies the implicit objective of influencing government-to-government relations in a given area of foreign affairs by engagement with citizens and groups whose opinions, values, activities and interests may help sway another government’s position.

For scholars of diplomacy and international relations, an increased interest in public diplomacy encapsulates the more general perception that the context for international politics has undergone a period of radical change. New methods of communication, used by a range of actors to reach interested parties beyond national boundaries, have changed how diplomats plan and execute their work. As a consequence, the conditions for promoting international cooperation have changed.

Dialogue between old and new sources of power and old and new centres of authority are blurring the distinctions between what is diplomatic activity and what is not, and who, therefore, are diplomats and who are not. Such dialogue is also creating an additional layer of diplomacy in which non-state actors communicate both with states and associations of states and with other non-state actors, and vice-versa. The effect has certainly been an explosion of diplomatic and quasi-diplomatic activity.²

Public diplomacy has emerged as an essential explicatory force for the kinds of quasi-diplomatic communication that have been increasingly taking place. Whereas PD traditionally referred to propaganda or a kind of diplomatic advertising, it has increasingly become a focal point for explaining how contemporary international relations function. This has entailed quite radical redefinitions of the concept of PD in the last decade, and it is these changes that are the focus of this study. Bruce Gregory succinctly summarises these developments:

Public diplomacy in the twentieth century was viewed as a state-based instrument used by foreign ministries and other government agencies to engage and persuade foreign publics for the purpose of influencing their governments. Today, public diplomacy has come to mean an instrument used by states, associations of states, and some sub-state and non-state actors to understand cultures, attitudes and behaviour; to build and manage relationships; and to influence thoughts and mobilize actions to advance their interests and values.³

This book focuses on one major aspect of these activities: namely, the conduct of public diplomacy by nation states when dealing with other, friendly nation states. In doing so, it explores the ways in which states cooperate and pursue their interests through open engagement with the civil societies of other democratic states. Although a great deal has been written about public diplomacy in the rather exceptional context of 9/11, this study provides a substantial body of empirical data focused upon peaceful, collaborative PD, as well as a number of unique cases for exploring the relationship between everyday political advocacy, trade and cultural promotion. While the importance of the War on Terror political context should not be understated, its terms of debate – like the Cold War before it – have had a rather skewing effect on conceptualisations of the term. This study represents an attempt to remedy that skewed focus and return to the day-to-day PD work embassies quietly conduct around the world.

This study furthermore has the aim of questioning and developing theoretical assumptions that have emerged with the ‘explosion’ of the PD field of scholarship over the past decade. Besides bridging the disciplines of international political communication, international relations and new media research, this book will add theoretical rigour to the debate surrounding the new public diplomacy by exploring the assumptions and expectations underlying practitioner activities and scholarly theories. The study has the ambitious goal of theory-building and of pointing to new directions for where the debate can move forward. In particular, I explore the relationship between new PD theories and the limitations of current accountability, organisational and decision-making cultures. The conclusion explores the potential – based on the cases presented here – for PD theory to radically reinvigorate interpretations of the new PD.

The term ‘public diplomacy’ has had a varied career. It has been around since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and its usage initially peaked after the First World War as a liberal criticism of secretive diplomacy. It re-emerged in the 1960s as a means of interpreting Cold War propaganda, and was associated during the 1980s with Reagan’s propaganda activities in Latin America. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, use of the term has grown exponentially, and it is these most recent articulations of the term which are the subject of this study.⁴

Although it has referred to different practices over the years, contemporary scholars would agree that a number of factors characterise the ‘old’ (i.e. twentieth-century) public diplomacy. It is typically described as a one-way flow of information in which PD actors control the message by making instrumentalist use of media channels, by ensuring limited interaction between communicator and ‘recipient’, and by maintaining focus on specific short-term objectives. It tends to rely on persuasion models that are deterministic in their interpretations of the effects of political communication upon audiences, and hence has been widely criticised by scholars attempting to understand the role of PD in contemporary foreign affairs.⁵

The emergence of public diplomacy as a staple term of governmental and scholarly discourse in the latter decades of the twentieth century has been superseded by the idea that there is, in the early twenty-first century, a new public diplomacy.⁶ The new public diplomacy is a major paradigm shift in international political communication, about which there has been strong consensus. According to academics and observers in the business of government communication, globalisation and a new media landscape have challenged traditional foreign ministry ‘gatekeeper’ structures, and foreign ministries can no longer lay claim to being sole or dominant actors in communicating foreign policy. Borders for information flows are more porous, and more actors are involved in international affairs and international politics. Diplomacy is increasingly accountable to, and influenced by, public debate and interest-group lobbies. This demands new ways of communicating foreign policy to a range of non-governmental international actors, and new ways of assessing the influence of these communicative efforts.⁷ From this perspective, the new public diplomacy is dialogical, collaborative and inclusive. It represents a break from ‘broadcasting’ models and takes advantage of social media to establish two-way engagement with the public.

The aim of this study is to take the scholarly debate forward by introducing systematic, comparative empirical data to the expectations associated with the new public diplomacy. In doing so, it questions how much current public diplomacy policy and practice conforms to older styles of communication, and how much can truly be considered new. What constraints do foreign ministries experience in practice when responding to the challenges of the new PD, and what does this tell us about the new PD as an explicatory concept? Implicit within this aim is the acknowledgement of a conflict between the ideals of the new public diplomacy as expressed in academic and theoretical debates, and the overriding pressures for PD actors to adapt to aspects of the new PD while producing tangible results for their stakeholders.

The question is not simply of how foreign ministries have phased out their archaic public diplomacy practices, but of how the continual need for short-term influence – the need to demonstrate a qualitative impact upon perceptions, diplomatic negotiations or other desired outcomes following communication initiatives – challenges and constrains efforts to reform policy, internal organisation, implementation and evaluation. This study investigates the extent to which a proposed paradigm shift has been realised and asks whether there are areas of theoretical debate which fail to explain problems represented in practitioner discourse. It is therefore the aim of this study to bring the ideals of the new public diplomacy into question through a systematic analysis of PD policy and practice as it has developed in three nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and to explore any tensions, constraints, contradictions and gaps between theory and practice. Furthermore, it is an aim of this study to use this empirical data as a basis for exploring how PD theory can evolve to meet the challenges presented by current practices.

This study is holistic in so far as it investigates the policies produced by foreign ministries and cultural institutes to guide their public diplomacy outputs as they evolve from old to new, campaign-level studies which analyse individual activities, and the methods employed to evaluate the outcomes of their work. The case studies are based on a contextualised understanding of the specific motivations, objectives and activities of the US State Department (Chapter 4), the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office and British Council (Chapter 5), and the Swedish Foreign Ministry and Swedish Institute (Chapter 6). Material includes interviews with public diplomacy practitioners from the five organisations and hundreds of policy documents, brochures, media articles and internal documents over an approximate ten-year period.

This introduction is divided into six sections. Section 1.1 positions public diplomacy in relation to its two most closely related concepts, propaganda and strategic communication. Section 1.2 introduces some general distinctions between the old and new public diplomacies, while Section 1.3 outlines a theoretical framework for approaching this problem. Section 1.4 builds upon this discussion and identifies six key issues in new PD research which will support analysis of the empirical material and theory-building in the final chapter, and Section 1.5 introduces the material and methods of the study. The final section gives an outline of the study as a whole.

1.1 Propaganda in the age of strategic communication

The term ‘propaganda’ originates from the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith set up by the Vatican to defend Catholicism against the Reformation. Until 1914, propaganda simply referred to ‘the means by which the converted attempted to persuade the unconverted’, with the act of ‘propagation’ an essentially neutral process. According to Philip Taylor, what distinguishes propaganda from other forms of persuasion is intent; namely, whether it is designed to achieve goals that benefit those organising the process. Questions of morality should be addressed towards the motivations of those carrying out the communication, not to the communication in itself.⁸

That said, it seems important to clarify that the manifestation of propaganda, and its development and evolution in any given context, must be tied to the pursuit of interests, and to the power relations that those interests support. Therefore the idea that the pejorative connotations the term now evokes are an unfair slur on a neutral process risks turning a blind eye to the ways in which interests have driven the mechanisms and strategies of propagandist communication towards immoral purposes. In short, propaganda does not exist independently of the ways in which it is practised, and it is difficult to argue for the basic neutrality of the term given its contingency upon the interests which motivate the development of propagandistic communication methods.

This is significant for distinguishing public diplomacy from propaganda, since the interests motivating PD have led to the creation of methods of outreach and persuasion which are by and large different to those of many types of propaganda. As Melissen notes in his discussion of the distinctions between the two terms, there is a liberal notion of pursuing interests through dialogue which pervades new PD thinking in particular.⁹ Manheim’s view that PD may be considered ‘propaganda in the age of strategic communication’ perhaps sums up this position, emphasising the pursuit of interests common to both terms, but also the differences in the mechanisms, intentions and tools which have developed in support of those interests.¹⁰

If PD can indeed be described as propaganda in the age of strategic communication, it is necessary to look at this latter term more closely. In defining strategic communication, it is first worth establishing the meaning of ‘strategy’ in relation to two closely associated terms, ‘policy’ and ‘tactics’. Simply and briefly put, ‘policy’ is derived from the Greek polis, the city state. It refers to legislature explaining the goals, objectives and priorities of a state. ‘Strategy’ is derived from the Greek strategos, the general who was responsible for implementing policy decisions. Rather than simply setting out a set of principles, strategy is a design or plan that outlines how the desired policy goals are to be achieved. ‘Tactics’ is from the Greek taktikos, of order or arranging. Tactics refers to the detail of how strategic designs are to be implemented.¹¹

In terms of political communication, strategy refers to the overall plan for communication of policies. It is distinct from those policies in their legislative form, and it is distinct from the specific operational details at the tactical level. Since a policy is essentially a statement of interests and intentions, strategic communication is a means of pursui...