Ed. Jon Melissen
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, h/b, £50.00
Just after World War 1, a group of the liberal-left in Britain began campaigning against orthodox – i.e. secret – diplomacy. It had caused the mind-bogglingly stupid carnage of World War 1, they argued, and had to go. This was the Union for Democratic Control (UDC). And when I first come across the term ‘public diplomacy’ the UDC came to mind. But in the case of ‘public diplomacy’, while public does mean open, diplomacy doesn’t mean diplomacy. ‘Public diplomacy’ is a recent term for a range of activities hitherto called propaganda, public relations, advertising and psy-ops. So while this book could have been been about the CIA, IRD, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its little UK cousin, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and all those American interventions in the Soviet bloc since the fall of the Berlin Wall, installing pro-American regimes with money and electioneering/PR techniques, of course it isn’t. ‘Public diplomacy’ is basically a euphemism used to take us away from the more sensitive areas and all of this collection’s contributors have accepted that steer.
The assembled writers in this volume are strikingly uninterested in the detail of what has been going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the latest episode of the American imperium. That imperium is the basic subject matter here but it is taken as read rather than analysed. But no matter. There are the odd interesting snippets.
‘Public diplomacy is similar to propaganda in that it tries to persuade people what to think, but it is fundamentally different from it in the sense that public diplomacy also listens to what people have to say.’ (p. 18)
‘….public diplomacy is widely considered an essential post-modern tool of statecraft, which generates legitimacy and acknowledges that in our globalized world the state has lost its monopoly on the processing and diffusion of information.’ (p. 57)
‘This new imperialism….may threaten, coerce and at times even invade, but it does so with the claim to improve (that is, democratize) states and then leave.’ (p. 59)
The same author, rather boldly goes so far as to write this:
‘as long as support to autocratic Arab regimes and Israel continues unabated, Washington’s rhetoric about freedom and democracy carries little conviction. (p. 61)……… As Iraq testifies, there is probably not enough soft power around to compensate for the friction of war.’ (p. 64)
Which about as tough as these essays get.
‘The consensus is that [public diplomacy] is made necessary by economic interdependence, possible by the communication revolution, and desireable by the rise in democratic and popular expectations.’ (p. 106)
In short, despite some attempted by-ways – ‘niche diplomacy’ (soft power for countries which have no hard power) – the central message of this book is that America and its allies, have got a big problem with the Internet. The lies of states and their secret agencies, transmitted by media assets, witting or not, is no longer the only game in town.
An example of the kind of area this collection might have looked at is the recent paper by Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Searching for the Successor Generation: Public Diplomacy, the US Embassy’s International Visitor Program and the Labour Party in the 1980s’. (1) Scott-Smith, whose book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom was reviewed in Lobster 43, lists the Labour MPs who took what Westminster wags call ‘the CIA tour’. Not only do we get the details of Tony Blair’s 1986 visit to the US, we get the name of the ‘political counsellor’ – no, not CIA; the man is now an Ambassador – who kept in touch with him in the UK on his return.
Notes
1 British Journal for Politics and International Relations, 2006, Vol. 8, pp.214-237