Culture's Purpose and the Work of Cultural Diplomacy
On November 5, 2009, the International Communication Program of American University’s School of International Service, with the co-sponsorship of the Public Diplomacy Council, hosted a 1-day conference on the AU campus exploring a fundamental question: What is the role of “culture” in the work of cultural diplomacy?
You can now view text and videos from the conference.
We brought together a distinguished and exciting group of speakers and panelists, including:
- James Glassman, former U.S. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
- Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture, Smithsonian Institution
- Frank Hodsoll, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
- Nancy Snow, Associate Professor of Public Diplomacy, Syracuse University
- Kathleen Brion, President of the Public Diplomacy Alumni Association
- John Brown, Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University
- Helle Dale, Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy at the Heritage Foundation
- Lawrence Wohlers, Senior Advisor for International Activities, Smithsonian Institution
- David Firestein, Director of Track II Diplomacy at the EastWest Institute
This conference was an opportunity for a productive exchange among key stakeholders in the future of cultural diplomacy who should be in more regular conversation: the policy community, practitioners in public diplomacy, and academic researchers on the topic.
During a moment of political transition in the United States, of the recommitment to soft power goals and to the renewed relevance of cultural diplomacy, this conference sought to examine and to assess the relationship between our understanding of how culture works, the expression of democratic ideals, and how cultural diplomacy functions as part of U.S. public diplomacy.
The conference was organized into two panels, each considering the relationship between culture, democracy, and cultural diplomacy. This dialogue will produce an initial position paper describing the role and effectiveness of culture in U.S. diplomacy and offer specific suggestions for how culture is best understood as part of public diplomacy initiatives. The first conference convened to consider the following:
The Expressive and Instrumental Power of Culture as a Diplomatic Tool
Rationale: Part of the appeal of cultural diplomacy is a widespread conviction that such opportunities for cultural exchange, experiences of cultural expression, and encounters with cultural creativity can have transformative effects in international affairs and among publics. But how does this happen? How does cultural work bring this about? In what ways does culture function as a kind of soft or smart power? How, in short, does culture effectively work as a diplomatic tool?
The Relationship between Culture, Democracy, and Public Diplomacy
Rationale: How cultural diplomacy communicates the virtues of democracy is not self-evident. Given the variable content of U. S. cultural diplomacy programs, is this content also democratic content? If cultural diplomacy expresses democratic content, how does it do so? If democracy is a self-evidently powerful idea with universal appeal, the turn to culture is a particularist one highlighting regional, national, and local distinctiveness. If democracy is a goal of U. S. cultural diplomacy, how can these trends by reconciled and what kind of democracy does cultural diplomacy express?
This ongoing cultural diplomacy project includes a short open-ended survey. A follow-up to our 2009 conference on cultural diplomacy, this exploratory survey invites aspiring and/or career professionals in the field of cultural diplomacy, both active and retired, to briefly reflect upon some key dimensions of diplomatic practice, with particular concern for the role of "culture" in this work. The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9XLK7TK. At present a second conference is also planned for October 2010.
Cultural Diplomacy Project Rationale
Even as the Obama Administration has regularly made a point to emphasize the importance of dialogue, soft power, smart power, and the role of cultural understanding as a part of the War on Terror skeptics also have expressed doubts about current approaches of U.S. public diplomacy. For the work of cultural diplomacy, how diverse cultural expressions specifically communicate U.S. culture and democracy to the rest of the world remains a question. Historically, cultural diplomacy often has been described in terms both of figures and programs that advertise the assumed evident and deep connections between U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts and their democratic content. Hence, Jazz is the “music of freedom,” Walt Whitman is the “bard of democracy,” and Jackson Pollock’s uniquely individual vision is taken to be characteristically American.
But the assumption of such an evident and deep connection between cultural expression and democratic content begs a variety of important questions. First: How does the work of diplomacy express U.S. culture? Policy statements regarding cultural diplomacy are not always clear on the process, referring to the circulation of values, ideas, information, images, ideologies or symbols, in ways interchangeable and indiscriminate. Approaches that stress strategic communication do not address content directly so much as how best to deliver it. There is, too, a more fundamental problem with cultural diplomacy, when it is perceived to be a form of strategic communication, propaganda, ideology, or an effort of persuasion. In such cases it appears to run counter to such basic democratic content as “freedom of expression” in the U.S, where cultural diplomacy is assumed to be an open exchange of ideas and information and, itself, an inherently democratic activity. In fact at present we lack a vocabulary to address the role of culture in cultural diplomacy.
Second: How are specific cultural values identified as particularly “democratic”? Closely related to this first set of concerns is the fact that democracy and democratization can be highly politically charged, carrying a variety of distinct local or regional implications and meanings. These are derived from particular histories and national political experiences. Post-Cold War U.S. programs of democracy promotion sometimes treat democracy as a national export. But, “democracy” can imply many different things in post-Soviet Russia, in post-authoritarian Chile, or in post-Saddam Iraq. This is compounded by the fact that there is no single definite set of values or ideas promoted by U.S. cultural diplomacy, but instead a list of candidates, including: choice, individualism, tolerance, diversity, dissent, fair play, and entrepreneurialism, alongside the freedoms of speech, religion, association, and the press, among many others. This raises the question, then, about the coherence of cultural diplomacy efforts with respect to democracy.
Third: How can cultural diplomacy successfully navigate a basic problem with the appeal to culture in the first place, the tension between difference and universality? In the work of cultural diplomacy, democracy is most often presented to be a self-evidently powerful idea which should have universal global appeal. But reference to culture in the context of international affairs is also one means to emphasize national distinctiveness, if in positive terms. On the one hand, democratic values are offered to the world as a transcendent and transhistorical good. On the other, acts of cultural diplomacy strive to communicate “who we are” and to “tell our story” through the values of a specifically U.S.-style democracy. These tendencies of the universal and of the particular can be at cross purposes.
Some of the evidence regarding the U.S.’s declining image abroad has been understood in terms of negative international reactions to trends in cultural globalization, perceived to be characteristically American (e. g. the charge of McDonaldization). In this instance specific expressions of U.S. popular consumer culture become increasingly widespread facts of globalization, including when so-called U.S.-style democracy is brought together with calls to increase consumer and citizen “choice” in other countries. The question of democracy poses a specific and direct challenge to cultural diplomacy, since democracy promotion suggests that U.S. culture should not enjoy any particular privilege regarding democratic expression, while the universal claims for democracy in the terms of cultural diplomacy can generate international resentment.
These represent some of the ways that the cultural identification of democratic content remains a question for U.S. cultural diplomacy. If and how democracy is communicated through cultural diplomacy is a concern that deserves more systematic consideration. This includes more attention to: the specific role of culture in cultural diplomacy; the process of how democratic values are expressed; how such values are recognized as specifically democratic; evident tensions between specific democratic traditions, on the one hand, and universal appeals to democratic norms, on the other; and finally the potential for negative international responses to specifically U.S.-style democracy. As part of a longer-term research and policy initiative on cultural diplomacy, the present conference hopes to make a productive start in this direction.
