Public Diplomacy = Interconnectedness

        “Public diplomacy complements and reinforces traditional diplomacy by communicating directly with foreign publics through a wide range of international information, educational and cultural exchange activities”, states the opening paragraph of the United States Information Agency’s brochure. Formed in 1953 and shut down 50 years later, the USIA was a foreign affairs agency that conducted public diplomacy for the U.S. government.  The end of the USIA has negatively affected how diplomacy is carried out overseas.
            This is the conclusion I came to while listening to the panel at American University last week on the new book, The Last Three Feet: Case Studies in Public Diplomacy, edited by William Kiehl. Members of the Public Diplomacy Council who contributed to the book spoke about the field of Public Diplomacy (PD) and how the U.S. government would benefit from restructuring its PD efforts. One of these efforts is promoting cultural awareness and understanding. Two examples were used to describe this – the Shanghai World’s Fair Expo and “American spaces” abroad in the form of libraries.
            Beatrice Camp, Consul General in Shanghai in 2010, managed the Expo and explained how the Chinese spent a decade creating the “biggest Expo in the world”, only to result in the U.S. Congress not wanting to put money into attending. If Hillary Clinton hadn’t thought otherwise and raised public money for the U.S. to attend, America would have been indebted to China for not supporting their effort, stated Michael Anderson. As the former public affairs officer in Indonesia, he also talked about how libraries used to be built worldwide, calling them “American spaces”, which held information on American culture. When these diminished along with the USIA, I’m assuming people in other countries could only learn about American culture through the news and word of mouth within their communities.
            Despite the lack of support for the Expo and canceling the USIA, the U.S. has promoted cultural understanding much more than in the past. Thussu explains the main theories behind International Communications in Approaches to Theorizing International Communication, the framework for what PD, international education, and other related fields have grown from. His discussions of the modernization and dependency paradigms, which emerged during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, show that we have come a long way in our PD efforts.
            The modernization paradigm asserts how the mass media “modernizes” countries, influencing them away from their traditional lifestyles and values. The dependency paradigm is similar, stating how developing nations are subordinate to and dependent on the developed, dominant nations. The dominant influence the subordinate by projecting their values and political structures onto them.  Both of these paradigms conclude that cultural understanding does not take place; cultures are either intensely promoted or diminished, not exchanged. This was the case when the world was split between the First and Third Worlds.
            Although the West does exert dominance on the world today, the onset of globalization has brought an increased acceptance of traditional, non-Western values. Cross-cultural understanding has increased with easier communication between cultures and transportation. Csaba Chikes, a retired senior Foreign Service officer in the USIA, talked about how even Ambassadors who attend Q&As with students in other countries make a difference. Having important U.S. government officials presenting to youth abroad shows respect and openness to understanding, just as attending (and therefore supporting) the Shanghai Expo presented the U.S. story and spirit to the Chinese. The USIA shutting down may have caused PD to backtrack a bit, but bringing realizations such as those in The Last Three Feet to light will keep the world in a new paradigm of interconnectedness.