Part One By Patricia H. Kushlis and
Patricia Lee Sharpe
This is the first of a five part series that will, on successive
Wednesdays, (1) define some of the special characteristics and powers of public
diplomacy as such, (2) examine some of the missteps that have brought American public
diplomacy into disrepute and made it ineffectual, (3) look at some demonstrably
successful best practices that may form the basis of a rehabilitated public
diplomacy capacity and (4) suggest some organizational reforms that would
integrate public diplomacy insights into the foreign policy process in ways
that would enormously enhance U.S. interactions with the world.
Music, art, drama,
literature---there are so many way of sharing culture across national borders. Our
lives are enormously broadened, deepened and enriched when we learn from one
another, and governments often make it
possible, through subsidies and various complex negotiations, for exhibits and
performances to be mounted in distant countries. To the extent that familiarity
increases mutual respect and understanding, the world benefits from a
multiplicity of such interactions, and public diplomacy uses some of these
cultural and intellectual resources to good effect.
However, the purpose of
public diplomacy, which employs other media as well as the arts, and the reason
it deserves strong support and generous funding by the American people has
little to do with idealism or purely benevolent inclinations, however much the
authors of this article are delighted to encourage and enjoy the arts as
private citizens.
Public diplomacy is what
America does when the U.S. needs popular support in other countries for American
policy, which is almost always the case.
Public diplomacy, well done, pressures governments to do what leaders
might be less inclined to do behind the closed doors of traditional diplomacy. In short, cultural and intellectual interaction
for public diplomacy purposes isn’t chummy chitchat. It’s a carefully articulated, infinitely
modulated, multi-media campaign for achieving essential national goals. Public
diplomacy, along with traditional diplomacy, works hard to avoid that hideous
waste of life and resources called war, which is seldom as cheap or conclusive
as habitual hawks would have us believe.
Government-to-government
diplomacy is an ancient and essential function, but public diplomacy is a newer
tool that only governments with good things to share and relatively little to
hide can use effectively. As the
diplomatic tool par excellence of democracy, public diplomacy operates by
precept and example. Public diplomats
disseminate information that can stand up to critical or even hostile
examination—and when truth penetrates secretive or corrupt regimes the hold of
tyranny erodes. Conversely, should an
exemplar of good governance fall into patterns of deceit, dishonesty, abuse of
power, corruption or hypocrisy, the way back is difficult. Credibility has been lost. “Psychological operations” won’t regenerate
confidence in U.S. leadership. Smarter
policy and intellectually-respectable public diplomacy may.
The Shambles that’s U.S. PD Today
The ramshackle public diplomacy architecture created
in 1999, when the functionally-coherent Unites States Information Agency (USIA), a
world-respected advocate for American values and policy, was married,
shotgun-style, to the State Department, has never performed as its cost-cutting
designers promised. Bits and pieces of a
once coordinated whole were scattered dysfunctionally among the offices and
bureaus of a chronically underfunded State Department. Even the once authoritative VOA was devalued
and dismembered, its remains hardly differentiated from the proliferation of
voices aimed manipulatively at slivers of audience here and there.
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