By PHK and PLS
Hello there! What does it take to get through?
Cultural diplomacy, a subset of Public Diplomacy, promotes understanding and good will.
You’ve seen the evidence here on WhirledView. Again and again. (See below.)
So why is it that the Bush administration (and the Clinton administration) and the U.S. Congress seem determined to study America’s image problem ad infinitum?
Terminal ethnocentrism?
A failure to note that organisms unwilling to adapt to changing habitats die–assuming they aren’t already dead?
Since 9/11 and particularly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, opinion poll after opinion poll has told the world, informed the U.S. administration and demonstrated to the American public that the image of the U.S. abroad is in the sub-cellar, the absolute dungeon of international esteem.
The U.S. government’s response has been study after study, each corroborating the results of the previous study and all leading nowhere. Some 31 studies have been conducted by well informed, responsible people who have made well founded, practicable suggestions for how to address the problem, but these studies and their authors have been routinely ignored.
Follow the money. That’s how you tell whether a report has been taken seriously or not in America. The past decade has shown us how to destroy a highly motivated professional public diplomacy cadre by devaluing and dispersing personnel while gutting or starving programs of proven effectiveness. The defunding began as a post Cold War misjudgment well before the U.S. Information Agency was dissolved; the dismantling accelerated after USIA was folded into a hostile, uncomprehending State Department. If U.S. policy makers really cared about the U.S. image abroad, the budget numbers for public diplomacy programs and personnel would have curved sharply upward, especially after the post 9/11 soul-searching, but they didn’t. They plummeted. Read this report - when the State Department decides to post it - for an update on the shocking statistics.
Read this report also to absorb the simple truths that target audiences (and competitors in the cultural diplomacy field) can teach us.
“The problem is sustainability,” according to a jaded Southeast Asian diplomat quoted in the report. “During every international crisis, you open a library, and then, when the crisis passes, you close it down and disburse the books. When you close this library, don’t bother to distribute the books. We have plenty already.”
“Interaction is the only way to make friends,” said an Egyptian filmmaker. “One hundred soldiers make Egyptians angry; one workshop makes friends.”
American cultural diplomacy “emerges at times of crisis,” observed a senior Egyptian official. “But this should be a process of building bridges, not a one way street. Developing respect for others and their ways of thinking—this is what cultural diplomacy does. Let there be a dialogue....We want to know about the real Americans. You have the right to be different, and I have the right to be different.”
“You’ve got to underpin your credibility by not engaging in propaganda but by showing the rough and the smooth,” said the curator of an exhibit of photography from Indonesia and Malaysia.
As a representative of the British Council put it, “We’re not prepared to accept the Foreign Office’s message for short-term political gain, because that would undermine our credibility.”
And, to return to the gist of the initial quote, it’s impossible to implement a serious cultural diplomacy program without continuity. According to an American diplomat in Cairo, “our cultural presence in this country no longer exists. The French Cultural Ministry can give you a monthly calendar. We can’t do anything because we don’t know when anything will happen....We’re not speaking to anyone anymore. People ask, Where’s your culture. Where are you?”
The sad thing is that a Republican Secretary of State in good standing understood the importance of culture-to-culture communications. In the “Forward” to this report he’s quoted as comparing diplomacy (with its public diplomacy component) to gardening, to planting and cultivating the seeds of good relations. “You get the weeds out when they are small. You also build confidence and understanding. Then, when a crisis arises, you have a solid base from which to work.” (Ignore the mixed metaphors.)
Unfortunately the State Department itself has never figured out why foreign public opinion counts. That’s one reason that President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Republican!) established the U.S. Information Agency in the first place. The current Republican administration, however, would rather invade countries with inadequate troop strength against the advice of our best generals than talk or negotiate with foreigners—rather like Pope Urban who sent Crusaders off to the Holy Land to retake it from the “Muslim Infidels” to keep them - the Crusaders that is - from causing him trouble in Rome. And, despite its willingness to underwrite innumerable studies, the present Republican Congress has been unwilling to pressure the administration to fund and implement recommendations that might actually begin to make a difference to how the U.S. is viewed abroad.
Meanwhile, the present report by the Congressionally-mandated Advisory Commission on Cultural Diplomacy is replete with excellent (and, regrettably, all too familiar) suggestions. Several have appeared here on WhirledView. In fact, PLS’s “Selling Cars, Colas and Countries” which first appeared here December 14 is quoted extensively and favorably in the report’s conclusion.
We agree that exchanges of all kinds need to be two-way streets; real understanding, the mutuality that approaches kinship, comes through dialogue. We strongly support the reestablishment of US cultural centers abroad at sites apart from the crusader castle embassies designed to keep everyone out, including non-official Americans. We think that both American and foreign professional cultural/public diplomacy staffs based here and abroad need to be increased substantially and that they need to be talking to people, not tied to their desks writing reports ad infinitum. (If they aren’t interacting, how can they have anything authoritative to report anyway?)
We also strongly agree with Ambassador Edward Djerejian’s conclusion that a good 80 percent of the U.S. image problem is directly tied to unpopular, unsuccessful Bush Administration policies, policies that need changing not sweetening. Moreover, like the Ambassador and the people who researched and wrote the most recent Cultural Diplomacy report, we also believe that culture in its broadest sense matters. You can’t communicate unless you know who you are talking to–and what you say won’t be accepted if it isn’t expressed with respect and contextual sophistication. It also helps if you are keenly aware of your own (and your culture’s) prejudices and how they tend to resonate globally, something that this administration is definitely not good at.
We come to these conclusions from years (nearly sixty altogether) of our own hands-on experience on virtually every continent of the globe and in countries where publics were hostile as well as friendly to the U.S. We may not agree in detail with all the report’s suggestions or priorities, but we would, in general, take the key argument further. Unless the U.S. government is willing to invest serious money in a sustained and reliable fashion and is also willing to consider major changes in policy, then don’t expect America’s wretched image abroad to begin to improve. Hopefully, Karen Hughes – now on her own maiden “fact-finding tour” – will be smart enough to see the light. And then courageous enough to convince her irascible boss of what needs to be done.
And by the way, better PD won’t be accomplished through the appointment of yet more “Brownie” politicos. Cultural diplomacy is not amateur night – and these jobs are not places to stash the otherwise unplaceable political hacks, whether in Washington’s educational and cultural bureaucracy or at embassies and consulates overseas. Public and cultural diplomacy require skills that take years to learn. It will take some time to rebuild the machine so recklessly dismantled during the past ten years or so, but it can be done, though not on the cheap—except by comparison to the present administration’s preference for fighting first, then flailing around in an effort to repair the self-inflicted damage.
Are we optimistic? Not really. The image that comes to mind is the U.S. armed to the teeth approaching Armageddon even as yet another group of well-intentioned experts labor to produce yet another destined-to-be-ignored, echo chamber report on cultural diplomacy.
By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia L. Sharpe
Previous WhirledView posts on U.S. public diplomacy include: Selling cars, colas and countries; Are Public Diplomacy's Glory Days Over; Seeing is Believing: Nixon, Khrushchev and the Magic of American Exhibits; Required Reading for Karen Hughes; International Exchange Should Go Both Ways; Are America's Cultural Institutes Going Out of Style?; Body Language Counts in Diplomacy; A Small Ray of Hope for Public Diplomacy; The Facts Don't Matter Any More; An Administration that Prefers Force to Persuasion; Misinformation and the Bush Administration: Into the Echo Chamber; Those Missing Educational Ingredients; Primer for First Time U.S. Political Ambassadors; and Look in the Mirror Karen.