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.
Although the tried and true educational exchanges and
international visitor programs housed in the bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs may appear to have been unaffected during this post-USIA decade,
since they are funded and staffed through a separate budget line, ECA’s
programs have been more or less privatized.
They are subject to the whims of competing sub-contractors, each intent
on delivering less for more. Many influential programs, such as university-to-university
exchanges, therefore, no longer exist. Even the enormously popular Sister City
program is now under the gun.
Even worse lay in store for USIA’s information
function, which was protected by no budgetary firewalls after
consolidation. Worse, it had no
lucrative contracts on offer. Working
unheralded for fifty years, thanks to the Smith-Mundt Act’s restrictions
against “propagandizing” the American public, USIA information officers
funneled accurate, timely information to audiences abroad. These finely tuned mechanisms for providing
contextually-sophisticated materials to foreign media didn’t just languish
under the new dispensation. Although the
State Department now ostentatiously revels in a quick adopter approach to new
communications devices, America’s ability to design and transmit policy
imperatives to carefully picked foreign audiences was allowed to atrophy by
traditional diplomats who never appreciated the value of open communications
with foreign publics. After 9/11, the
Pentagon leapt to fill this vacuum, throwing billions at untested contractors
for “strategic communications” programs, some intentionally deceptive, as war
propaganda tends to be, others merely inept, all tending to undermine the
credibility of U.S. information programs
overall. According to an AP story on 2/5/09, the Pentagon planned to spend $4.7
billion—in one fiscal year!—for its overt and covert information operations. Budgeting
ever more for propaganda masquerading as information, the Pentagon reaps
skeptics not friends. What thrifty little old USIA could have done with
money like that!
Unfortunately, merely redirecting money from Defense
to State won’t improve the quality and impact of American public information
programs quickly, because many of the experienced information officers who
could pull things together are gone. As
public diplomacy under the State Department was downgraded, denatured and
defunded, many devoted and skilled officers retired early. Others just resigned out of misuse or disgust. The recruitment, training and assignment
process now in place has not replaced this lost generation with a capable new
cadre. Foreign service recruits aren’t
dumb, and not enough of them have seen a future in public diplomacy. In 1986
there were 1742 PD-designated positions.
Today there are 1332, a reduction of 24%. Worse yet, too many of these slots are filled
by generalists with little training and less experience in public
diplomacy. The Pentagon, by contrast,
employs 27,000 for “recruitment, advertising and public relations – almost as
many as the total State Department workforce.”
And the attrition of State’s public diplomacy specialists
continues.
The State Department’s organization chart tells
all. There is no coherent
well-integrated public diplomacy function with an attractive career ladder for
specialists who may rise to share in major foreign policy decision-making. Public diplomacy used to have a
well-organized, high morale home in an independent agency run by the likes of
the legendary Edward R. Murrow. Who of his
national stature would be willing to assume the powerless position of Under
Secretary for Public Diplomacy these days?
None that we have seen. And when
under-qualified people fill this critical position, America’s PD capacity
erodes that much more. No wonder the
Obama Administration has set up a White House Global Engagement Directorate to
compensate for the skill and vision gap within the State Department, although
we are not entirely surprised. An in-house
PR capacity will always tempt a powerful executive.