Is American Cultural Diplomacy a Hot Potato?

johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com [posted some years ago]

Is American Cultural Diplomacy a Hot Potato?

John Brown

(Note:  This paper is a near-final draft that, it is expected, will be published in the near future. The author would appreciate comments/criticisms, 

but asks that the piece not be cited until it is published -- if it indeed will be.)

"Ô douce Volupté, sans qui, dès notre enfance, Le vivre et le mourir nous deviendraient égaux."

--La Fontaine

Enter Cultural Diplomacy

In 1959, the term “cultural diplomacy” officially entered into the U.S. State Department lexicon.

In that year, in remarks [1]  at the University of Maine recorded in Vital Speeches of the Day, Robert H. Thayer, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for the Coordination of International Educational and Cultural Relations, stated that:

[F]oreign relationships are no longer relationships between government, or heads of state – foreign relationships are the relationship between people of all countries – and relationships between peoples are governed by the way people think and live, and eat, and feel and this represents the culture of a people; and so today we have in the forefront of the implementation of our foreign policy, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, and to my mind the most important means of bringing complete mutual understanding between peoples, which in turns compels mutual understanding between governments. ...

The objective of American cultural diplomacy is to create in the peoples of the world a perfect understanding of the life and culture of America.

Also in 1959, a State Department 50-page publication (describing foreign USG foreign outreach program) stated its own definition of cultural diplomacy: “the direct and enduring contact between peoples of different nations” aiming to “help create a better climate of international trust and understanding in which official relations can operate.” [2]

Can the Undefinable Be Defined?

Since these two Cold War definitions, countless others have appeared worldwide, all trying to clarify what has become, according to C.E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried in a recently published volume, “an increasingly perplexing and controversial term.” [3]

Efforts to define cultural diplomacy have included distinguishing it from related forms of communication: propaganda (first highlighted as a term in the 16^th century by the Roman Catholic Church) [4] and public diplomacy, coined in its original Cold War era meaning at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the mid-1960s. [5]

Distinctions have been made between cultural diplomacy and cultural relations. The introduction to former U.S. diplomat/scholar Richard Arndt’s study, The First Resort of Kings -- a magnificent achievement, charmingly idiosyncratic -- states:

“Cultural relations” ... (and its synonym – at least in the U.S. – “culturalaffairs”) means literally the relations between national cultures, those aspects of intellect and education lodged in any society that tends to cross borders and connect with foreign institutions. Cultural relations grow naturally and organically, without government intervention. ... [C]ulturaldiplomacy can only be said to take place when formal diplomats, serving national governments, try to shape and channel this natural flow to advance national interests." [6]

Cultural relations and cultural exchange are also differentiated. According to Nicholas J. Cull, author of widely admired studies about the United States Information Agency, cultural diplomacy “is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment through making its cultural resources and achievement known overseas and/or facilitating cultural transformation abroad.” For the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it is “the furthering of international relations by cultural exchange.”

As for cultural exchange, the OED says it is “a temporary reciprocal exchange of representatives, students, or artists between countries, with the aim of fostering goodwill and mutual understanding.” For Cull, it is “an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by sending its citizens overseas and reciprocally accepting citizens from overseas for a period of study and/or acculturation.” [7]

What the hell is it, anyway?

Does the lack of a universally accepted definition of cultural diplomacy make it an “awkward or delicate matter” -- in other words, a “hot potato”? [8]

My inclination is to say yes.

The more traditional political diplomacy and economic diplomacy are more straightforward and thus less problematical. The former, according to Thayer, is “the method used to implement our foreign policy.” The latter occurred, says Thayer, due to “our rapid economic development,” which caused foreign relations to become “involved in trade agreements, customs duties, export and import duties and the like.”

The use of military force, an expression of “hard power,” can be more acceptable to policymakers and the public than the vague “soft power” with which cultural diplomacy is associated. Does not labeling a program as a war against something (terror, drugs, poverty) mobilize voters to support it more willingly than calling for activities focused on mutual understanding with other peoples, and especially those who, as George W. Bush put it, “hate our freedoms?”[9]

“When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about soft power in 2003, he replied I don’t know what it means,” soft-power guru Joseph Nye notes in his 2006 essay on the subject. [10]

In order to justify funding for cultural diplomacy, its advocates focus on its concrete educational dimension (e.g., the Fulbright program [11]) rather than its more nebulous cultural ones. Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, thinks that teaching arts management to foreigners is a no-nonsense “new approach” to cultural diplomacy, better than taxpayer-provided foreign artistic performances that don’t "really" influence citizens by entertaining the elite. [12] Even the culturally sensitive Arndt, in a recent interview, said cultural diplomacy should be “probably 60 or 70 percent education.” [13]

“Seeing,” to quote Thayer’s speech again, is “believing” -- but with cultural diplomacy you can’t see precisely what you’re supposed to believe! As the eminent cultural diplomacy scholar Frank Ninkovich writes:

[C]ultural ... programs cannot effectively promote narrow national interests (of which the United States has many). That sort of thing must be left to the traditional instruments of foreign policy. The programs themselves, like internationalism more generally, are based at bottom on an act of faith." [14] 

The musician Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola, who travelled the world over on jazz tours sponsored by the State Department, provided the essence of cultural diplomacy with this quotation from their musical: “No commodity is quite so strange/As this thing called cultural exchange.” [15]

Culture and Diplomacy

There is a tension between culture, in all its strangeness, and diplomacy, in all its seriousness. To be sure, diplomacy and culture are forms of communication. But they are different kinds of communication. At is most basic, diplomacy consists ofnegotiations that traditionally were (and still are) held behind closed doors.

On the other hand, culture -- highbrow, lowbrow, or seen anthropologically (to quote Thayer again, “the way people think and live, and eat, and feel”) is essentially an open conversation or declaration, expressed most strikingly and memorably by artists sharing (and, let's face it, sometimes spitting)  their genius at their audiences.

Negotiations, in theory (but, granted, not always in practice), can lead to a signed, formal agreement, whereas the outcome of “mutual understanding,” putatively produced by cultural diplomacy, cannot be so clearly measured. [16] And sometimes, as Ninkovich suggests, the meeting of one culture with another can lead to shock and deracination, not kumbaya people-to-people love-ins.

Of course, the boundaries between art and diplomacy are at times fuzzy. Some ambassadorial political appointees with taste and money have admirable art exhibitions, with the State Department curating their display through its Office of Art in Embassies.[17] And some artists can be savvy negotiators.

Take Picasso. He was probably far tougher at getting his own way that low-ranking “cultural diplomats” negotiating with their foreign counterparts about a cultural agreement on how many academics they should exchange. As the anecdote goes, when a visitor to the egocentric Spaniard’s studio “stood in front of a painting for several minutes, and asked  ... ‘What does it represent?’ Picasso replied without hesitation, ‘Two hundred thousand dollars.’ ” [18]

Still, wouldn’t most agree that Picasso was an artist first, and a negotiator second? Michael K. Busch, Program Coordinator at the Colin L. Powell Center for Leadership and Service at The City College of New York, notes that at the State Department “Bureaucrats are rarely celebrated for their aesthetic sensibilities. Indeed, the modern machinery of state seems to suffocate the creative spirit by design.” [19] 

As one distinguished former U.S. ambassador (kind enough to read this piece in draft) put it to me:  a "normal cultural activity" is when "the artist or museum or poet gets paid, and that's the end of it." I, fake puritan that I am, won’t tell you, dear reader, what this reminds me of, if in the cited quotation "p" is replaced by "l."

William Benton, an assistant secretary of state during the Truman administration, noted in 1959 (the year the term cultural diplomacy was coined "officially" by the USG) that the U.S. State Department

was in the propaganda business and not in the art business. The State Department will always be in the propaganda business and will never be in the art business. 'Art' judged from the standpoint of the U.S. Government and its Congressional appropriations, applied to overseas activities, must always be judged from its impact as propaganda – and never from its impact as art. [20]

The uneasiness of diplomatic and other government officials when dealing with cultural diplomacy was demonstrated during the so-called “golden age” [21] of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. At that time, a considerable number of USG-supported artistic initiatives caused consternation -- some, granted, no more than tempests-in-a-teapot -- for being at odds with American “values,” with the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA)[22] involved, not to speak of the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government. [23]

Today there is more tolerance among USA lawmakers and their constituencies for theU.S. government using unconventional forms of cultural expression (especially if they are obtained at bargain-store prices) as a way to promote American interests overseas. But it is hard to imagine that the State Department -- currently enamored with hip-hop as the premier American musical form for export ("Hip hop is America," said Hillary Clinton [24]) -- would dare using truly risqués artists of this musical genre, with its often scatological, misogynistic lyrics, in order to make the world safe for democracy by improving the American image overseas. [25]

           

“Culture should never be diplomatic.”

The diplomat-artist mutual suspicion goes both ways. To some of the artistically inclined, cultural diplomacy is a not-so-hidden effort camouflaged to manipulate them. In the words of Brandon Woolf: 

We are compelled to ask: Is cultural diplomacy a marketing tool for a damaged American image abroad? ... Or: Is cultural diplomacy a tool for disseminating the varied lore of neoliberal ideology? ... Or: Is cultural diplomacy in a slightly more sinister light  a tool of American “soft power,” as it was considered during the Cold War? Or: Is cultural diplomacy a strictly functional or transactional tool veiled somehow by fuzzy invocations of 'culture' employed to achieve particular policy objectives. Or: Is cultural diplomacy ... a tool designed to engage 'today’s and tomorrow’s leaders in the discussion and development of approaches, mechanisms, and actions that use culture as the keystone in effectively addressing and anticipating national, international, and human security concerns.' Culture as/for security? Interesting. [26]

Brandon Woolf’s skeptical if not conspiratorial attitude is echoed by sociologist and cultural commentator Tiffany Jenkins who, in her piece titled “Artists, resist this propagandist agenda,” argues that “culture should never be diplomatic.”

She notes that “The relationship between culture and politics has never been straightforward. The arts have been used by leaders throughout history to bolster their status and authority, and to lend weight to concepts such as ‘the nation’. Artists, in turn, have used their talents to promote different agendas and to take sides in conflicts and revolutions. But, in recent times, this relationship has been formalised, made more explicit and prescriptive. After the failures of the ‘war on terror’, politicians are now elevating the role of culture in international policymaking.”

She adds that “Cultural diplomacy encourages art to be aligned with government and politics, when the relationship is always more complicated. ... Even when art is political, it is usually at its most powerful when it is nuanced.” [27]

To be sure, some artists, no matter how “high” or “low” their art, have long collaborated with the powers-that-be. As Jenkins herself states, “many cultural leaders -- eager for affirmation and purpose -- have embraced the 'agenda' of international policymaking." The degree of this collaboration (or submission, in the case of authoritarian/totalitarian states) has varied throughout history and from country to country. [28] 

But I would say that the modern artistic sensibility finds too close a rapport with the government party line (foreign or otherwise) unsettling, despite the existence of a cultural diplomacy that arguably aims by its very tortuous terminology to reconcile a tension between art and the state that has existed since Plato -- who wanted, as is well known, to expel troublesome artists from his ideal Republic. [29]

Here’s what the British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) declares: “Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn't served power. When the USgovernment loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?’"[30] Or, as one commentator put it, “The argument goes that when the government touches Hip Hop, it’s been sullied beyond value.” [31]

Dare not tell its name

Cultural diplomacy can be a hot potato for three reasons suggested thus far:

--It’s hard to define and thus to justify its being government-funded;

--It can be at odds with the no-risk diplomatic/bureaucratic mentality, especially in the case of its artistic dimension;

--It is viewed with suspicion by its some of its beneficiaries, potential or actual. Also, the cultural diplomacy of a sending country, intended to improve “mutual understanding,” can actually offend the receiving country. [32]

A final reason why cultural diplomacy can be a hot potato -- and this especially applies to the United States -- is that it includes the word “culture” in its adjectival form. Our Cold War coiner of “cultural diplomacy” Robert Thayer, who lived abroard -- France and Rumania, where culture played such an important role in national life -- confessed in his 1959 Orono, Maine speech: 

What is cultural diplomacy and how is it coordinated? Culture is a word considered by  many people as carrying weird and unpleasant connotations -- long hair, bohemian living, musty books, and ivory towers -- or else it is considered as being either something way up in the intellectual stratosphere, or a false facade of artificial refinement.

In a previously published article, [33] I speculate on historical reasons for America’s “anti-cultural” attitude, including why it has no ministry of culture, so I will not repeat them here. But, to make my point that the word “culture” has historically been discomforting for Americans, let me cite what President John F. Kennedy’s appointee to then-new post of assistant secretary of  state for educational and cultural affairs, Philip H. Coombs, had to say:

[T]here is the unhappy fact that in our society this excellent word "culture" is in some quarters its own worst enemy, as anyone will agree who has ever sought funds for "cultural affairs" from a congressional appropriations committee. There are still those who find it a less than manly word and deride the notion that anything wearing the label could possibly have important bearing on the serious business of foreign policy. (Even the British have their troubles with it. The London Times in 1934 congratulated the founders of the British Council for avoiding "culture" in its title. It was a word, the Times observed, which "comes clumsily and shyly off the Englishman’s tongue.") [34]

And here’s CIA agent Thomas W. Braden’s public confession, appearing in a May 20, 1967 mass circulation magazine on why his agency secretly supported foreign “cultural outreach” operations during the early Cold War:

Does anyone really think that congressmen would foster a foreign tour by an artist who has or has had left-wing connections? And imagine the scuffles that would break out as congressmen fought over money to subsidize the organizations in their home districts. ...  Back in the early 1950's, when the Cold War was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. [35]

Finally, the observations of a practicing Cultural Affairs Officer (an accomplished poet, rare among State Department functionaries) who served in Western Europeduring the last decades of the past century are still relevant on how cultural diplomacy -- or at least its cultural side -- is perceived today:

I am always embarrassed when people ask me what I do. And people, for the lack of anything better to say, seem to be asking it all the time. I reply, sotto voce, that I am the Cultural Attaché, hoping that they won't hear and that we can go on to something else. "But what does a Cultural Attaché DO?" they come back brightly, sensing they've got me on the defensive. I try to pass it off with a melancholy quip like "as little mischief as possible," hoping that my unwillingness to supply information will discourage them. Such a happy solution is rare. They persist (more inquisitorial now): "But I mean, what you DO?"

I'd really like to explain that my purpose in life, if you want to get down to that, is being, not doing, but even I have come to realize that there's no point trying to go into all that at a cocktail party. So I resign myself and try to fabricate a version of "what I do" that will confer on my activities some semblance of respectability.

I cast about for the proper retort. Education. That's it. It's a respectable word. (Culture is still a "dirty" one.) So I reply, in that serious, deliberate tone proper to the civil servant, that I am involved in setting up exchanges of students and professors.

"Oh, how interesting," warbles the little old lady, her birdlike eye taking on a glitter, "how glad I am to meet you. My granddaughter wants to get a Fulbright and go to Europe to study singing. Could you tell me ... "

You're saved. For, as all of you know, our exchange apparatus is as complicated as a Dr. Seuss machine, and you can spend a very very long time trying to explain it.

Educational exchange is a fine face-saver. But it's only a part of my job. [36]

***

John H. Brown, former diplomat dealing with press and cultural affairs, joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1981 and was promoted into its senior ranks in 1997. He served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. He currently teaches a graduate-level course at Georgetown University, “Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Historical Overview,” and is a consultant to the Open World Leadership Center Trust Fund program. He compiles the near-daily “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review Blog.”

Image from

---

[1] Robert H. Thayer, “Cultural Diplomacy: Seeing is Believing,” Vital Speeches of the Day 25 (October 1, 1959): 740-744. According to Thayer, however, the cultural diplomacy of the Soviets was not to be trusted: “When the Soviets speak of peace they have in mind red peace – the absolute victory of world communism.” A year after Thayer’s speech, Frederick C. Barghoorn published his study, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). (On Barghoorn,  who arguably helped to give “cultural diplomacy” a bad name in the U.S. as a form of Soviet propaganda, see http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/26/obituaries/frederick-barghoorn-80-scholar-detained-in-soviet-union-in-1963.html). The Library of Congress online catalog provides evidence that this was the first scholarly volume to use the term “cultural diplomacy.” On Thayer and U.S. cultural diplomacy in the late 1950s, see Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc, 2006), chapter 13, especially p. 295. As the scholar Nicholas J. Cull kindly pointed out to me, the term “cultural diplomacy” was mentioned in four newspapers prior to 1959, the most important among these articles being Aline B. Louchheim, “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect,” New York Times, January 3, 1954, 16-18, in which she writes (p. 18):

One remembers vividly the virtual inquisition to which Congress subjected members of the State department in 1946 when the latter sent a moderately “modern” art exhibition abroad [see endnote 20]. One thinks of the prevailing, violent antagonism of the majority of Congress toward modern art today. (Ironically, whereas the Congressional Record contains many damnations of abstract art as part of a disruptive Communist plot, inBrazil, when the social-realist Communist painters want to castigate abstract art which they hate with the worst possible epithet, they call it “arte Americana.”) ...

[T]he State Department could have a well-organized, adequately financed program of cultural relations by experts in the fields of all arts in which contemporary expression would not be taboo. ...

[O]ne of the ways in which we might turn reluctant and uneasy military allies into friends would be to earn their respect for our contemporary culture. We can never do this if we are officially indifferent to their cultural efforts and if we remain officially antagonistic to our own most advanced, imaginative and best achievements in modern art and modern architecture.

[2] Cultural Diplomacy, International Educational Exchange Service, Bureau of International Cultural Relations, U.S. Department of State (1959), iv; cited in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht  and Mark C. Donfried (eds.),  Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2010), 25, footnote 2.

[3] Gienow-Hecht and Donfried, 13. Other recent attempts at defining cultural diplomacy (including in the 21^st century) can be found in the following: ICD Blog Team, “What Does Cultural Diplomacy Mean to You? 2013, Cultural Diplomacy News (April 4, 2013). For some rehttp://culturaldiplomacynews.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/what-does-cultural-diplomacy-means-for-you/; Karl-Erik Norrman, “Definitions, Ideas, Visions and Challenges for Cultural Diplomacy” (January 3, 2013), e-International Relations http://www.e-ir.info/2013/01/03/definitions-ideas-visions-and-challenges-for-cultural-diplomacy/; Cultural Diplomacy: does it work? A Note by the Director, The Ditchley Foundation (March, 2013); http://www.ditchley.co.uk/conferences/past-programme/2010-2019/2012/cultural-diplomacy; “Public and Private Cultural Exchange-Based Diplomacy: New Models for the 21^st Century: Salzburg Global Seminar Session 490 [April 28–May 2, 2012] http://www.rsclark.org/uploads/cm-salzburgsem.pdf;.

[4] “Sacred Congregation of Propaganda,” Catholic Encyclopedia onlinehttp://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12456a.htm.

[5] Nicholas J. Cull, “‘Public Diplomacy’ Before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase,”USC Center on Public Diplomacy http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/pdfs/gullion.pdf.

[6] Arndt, xviii.

[7] Nicholas J. Cull, “Public diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 616, Public Diplomacy in a Changing World (March, 2008), 33-34.

[8] The FreeDictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hot+potato.

[9] “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation,” Washington Post, September 20, 2001. Skepticism about the benefits of "culture" are shared among members of academe:  "Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading 'War and Peace,' for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment."  From Gregory Currie, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" New York Times, June 2, 2013

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/

[10] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Think Again: Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, February 23, 2006 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2006/02/22/think_again_soft_power.

[11] On the Fulbright program, see the section of the State Department homepage athttp://eca.state.gov/fulbright.

[12] Michael Kaiser, “How Helpful Is Cultural Diplomacy?” Huffington Post (September 21, 2009) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaiser/how-helpful-is-cultural-d_b_293080.html. On Kaiser, see 

[13] Brian Hardzinski, Suzette Grillot and Joshua Landis, “Evolution Of Embassy Construction Shows The Terrorists Won,” KGOU (May 13, 2013)

http://kgou.org/post/evolution-embassy-construction-shows-terrorists-won;. Other justification are used, as stated by Cultural Diplomacy: The Linchpin of Public Diplomacy Report of the Advisory Committee on  Cultural Diplomacy (September 2005), 1-2 http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/54374.pdf:  “Cultural diplomacy:  • Helps create ‘a foundation of trust’ with other peoples, which policy makers can  build on to reach political, economic, and military agreements;  • Encourages other peoples to give the United States the benefit of the doubt on  specific policy issues or requests for collaboration, since there is a presumption of  shared interests;  • Demonstrates our values, and our interest in values, and combats the popular  notion that Americans are shallow, violent, and godless;  • Affirms that we have such values as family, faith, and the desire for education in  common with others;  • Creates relationships with peoples, which endure beyond changes in government;   • Can reach influential members of foreign societies, who cannot be reached through traditional embassy functions;  • Provides a positive agenda for cooperation in spite of policy differences;  • Creates a neutral platform for people-to-people contact;  • Serves as a flexible, universally acceptable vehicle for rapprochement with  countries where diplomatic relations have been strained or are absent;  • Is uniquely able to reach out to young people, to non-elites, to broad audiences  with a much reduced language barrier;  • Fosters the growth of civil society; • Educates Americans on the values and sensitivities of other societies, helping us  to avoid gaffes and missteps;  • Counterbalances misunderstanding, hatred, and terrorism;  • Can leaven foreign internal cultural debates on the side of openness and tolerance.” Comment: This list is so all-inclusive as to be meaningless. Another, more recent, example of "over-hyping" cultural diplomacy is Alan Baker, "Conflict resolution through cultural diplomacy in the Middle East," enterstageright.com http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0613/0613conflictresmideast.htm Regarding the tendency of cultural diplomacy advocates seeking support/funding for it (with the best of intentions) by depicting it essentially as an instrument rather than a "cultural" end in and of itself, see John Brown, "New Initiatives in Cultural Diplomacy: A Comment," Notes and Essays, January 8, 2012 http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-initiatives-in-cultural-diplomacy.html. Consider the statement by Antonin Bawdry, current Cultural Counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S., “Les fins de la diplomatie culturelle ne sont pas culturelles.” École normale supérieure, “Puissance de l’autre. A quoi sert la diplomatie culturelle? -1: Séminaire d’Antonin Baudry“ (February 9, 2012) http://savoirsenmultimedia.ens.fr/expose.php?id=650

[14] Frank Ninkovich, U.S. Information and Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1996), 58.

[15]  Cited in Anastasia Tsioulcas, “Up the World:  Penny Von Eschen [:] Satchmo Blows Up the World,” JazzTimes, January/February 2006http://jazztimes.com/articles/16519-satchmo-blows-up-the-world-penny-von-eschen;

[16] Moreover, cultural diplomacy, no matter how defined, can cause “deracination, the uprooting of traditional cultural identities” (Ninkovich, 44) and may not be as benign as Thayer envisioned.

[17] “Arts in Embassies” is one of the State Department’s best (and least known) cultural diplomacy programs (see http://art.state.gov/default.aspx), which strategically is not under the jurisdiction of the Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (see http://eca.state.gov/), but under its Overseas Building Operations. The perfect way to package support for high culture from the eyes of Congress by putting it under “Building Operations”?

[18] Allen Adamson, “What Picasso Knew: Branding Tips For Artists From An Art Basel Insider,” Forbes (May 22, 2013)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/allenadamson/2013/05/22/what-picasso-knew-branding-tips-for-artists-from-an-art-basel-insider/.

[19] Michael K. Busch “Diplomatic Dissent in the State Department,” michaelkbusch.wordpress.com (July 8, 2012)

http://michaelkbusch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/diplomatic-dissent-in-the-state-department/.

[20] Cited in Marilyn S. Kushner, “Exhibiting Art at the American Nation Exhibition inMoscow, 1959,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4 (Winter 2002): 6. As assistant secretary of state, Benton had learned from bitter experience what a hot potato cultural diplomacy (not yet designated as such) could be when an exhibit of contemporary American art displayed overseas under State Department auspices in the late 1940s came under strong U.S. media, Congressional, and White House criticism. See John Brown, “Arts Diplomacy: The Neglected Aspect of Cultural Diplomacy,” in William P. Kiehl, ed., America’s Dialogue with the World, Public Diplomacy Council (2006), 76-78 http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/pdfs/061220_brown.pdf. More on this cultural diplomacy fiasco, quite well documented in the scholarly literature, can be found in the undated brochure produced by the University of Oklahoma, Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and The Politics Of Cultural Diplomacyhttps://www.ou.edu/content/dam/fjjma/U.S.%20State%20Collection/Art%20Interrupted%20Brochure-Updated.pdf. See also Georgia Museum of Art, Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy. (Athens, GA :University of Georgia, 2012)

[21] A term used by William Glade, “Issues in the Genesis and Organization of Cultural Diplomacy: A Brief Cultural History,” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society Vol. 39 (Winter 2009): 240. Says Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield: “Studies of cultural diplomacy continue to grow exponentially—or does it only seem that way? The number of historians who have been explaining the triumph of West over East in terms of the fine arts, the popular arts, and the black arts of propaganda threatens to exceed the number of pianists, painters, and trumpeters who were showcased in the ‘soft power’ programs that may have accelerated the end of the Cold War.”  Stephen J. Whitfield, “Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–(Fall 2011): 233.

[22] On USIA, see “United States Information Agency,”http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia/. While USIA carried out some cultural diplomacy programs, its focus was more on information/ public diplomacy. See also Brown, 81-82.

[23] For a summary of these “hot potatoes,” in the late 1940s and 1950s, which could be the subject of many opere buffe, see Kushner: 7, footnote 4.

[24] Cited in Hishaam Aidi, “Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy: Diplomats and officials use the music of the oppressed to connect with disaffected Muslim youth,” Aljazerra, November 7, 2011http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011103091018299924.html.

[25] See Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, “Hip-Hop Diplomacy? How the State Department Uses Rap to Spread Propaganda Abroad,”  AlterNet January 4, 2012http://www.alternet.org/print/story/153662/hip-hop_diplomacy_how_the_state_department_uses_rap_to_spread_propaganda_abroad.

[26] Brandon Woolf, “Questioning Cultural Diplomacy,” The Arts Politic (Spring 2010): 28-30  http://www.academia.edu/352755/Questioning_Cultural_Diplomacy.

[27] Tiffany Jenkins, “Artists, resist this propagandist agenda,” Spiked (October 27, 2009)

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7629/.

[28] A noteworthy article arguing that the U.S. State Department-sponsored Cultural Presentations Programs beginning in 1954 were not culturally imperialistic is Danielle Fosler-Lussier, “Music Pushed, Music Pulled, Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism,” Diplomatic History  36 (January,  2012): 53-64.

[29] Bob Zunjic, “Plato: The Republic Books 2, 3 and 10: An Outline,” uri.eduhttp://www.uri.edu/personal/szunjic/philos/republ.htm.

[30] Cited by Aidi (see endnote 25).

[31] Alex Dwyer, “Samsonite Man: A Look At Hip Hop's Diplomatic Affairs,” HipHop DX, January 27, 2012http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/editorials/id.1845/title.samsonite-man-a-look-at-hip-hops-diplomatic-affairs.

[32] See Peter Aspden, “Olympic censors and sensibility in Qatar,” BD Live, May 2, 2013

http://www.bdlive.co.za/life/2013/05/02/olympic-censors-and-sensibility-in-qatar.

[33] I share the views of Gienow-Hecht and Donfried: 22 that in the case of cultural diplomacy, “though pure and absolute neutrality is impossible, distance from governments and private-sector agendas seems advisable,” although from my experience as a U.S. Cultural Affairs officer, mostly in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, local publics actually welcomed official Embassy support of cultural events. But that was the twentieth-century in lands occupied by the Soviets.

[34] Philip H. Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Foreign

Affairs (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 18. See also endnote 1.

[35] Thomas W. Braden. "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral.'" The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/braden_20may1967.html. The covert promotion by the CIA of American culture during the early Cold War has received increased scholarly attention in recent years. See John Brown, “Should the piper be paid? Three schools of thought on culture and foreign policy during the Cold War,” Place Branding 1 (November 2005): 420–423. George Kennan who, unlike many of his diplomatic colleagues, had literary aspirations, had this to say a propos of this episode: “This country has no Ministry of Culture, and C.I.A. was obliged to do what it could to try to fill the gap. It should be praised for having done so.'' Cited in Josef Joffe, “America's Secret Weapon: A study of how the C.I.A. sponsored modern art exhibitions and literary journals during the cold war” [A Review of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders], New York Times, April 23, 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joffet.html.

[36] http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_07-09/brown_cao/brown_cao.html; first published in the Foreign Service Journal 41 (June 1964) [pages not provided in link]. On John L. Brown, whose voluminous papers are stored at the Georgetown Special Collections Research Centerhttp://www.library.georgetown.edu/special-collections, see Arndt, especially pp. 357-59.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)