The conduct of
diplomacy has changed significantly over the past sixty years.
Prior to World War II, diplomacy was essentially a
government-to-government relationship. Since the war, it has
broadened to include a government - to - foreign people
connection, now called public diplomacy.1
I
The word diplomacy has
its roots in Greek and was later used by the French (diplomatie)
to refer to the work of a negotiator on behalf of a sovereign.
There is a long history of diplomatic activity going back at
least two millennia. Sovereigns sent envoys to other sovereigns
for various reasons: to prevent wars, to cease hostilities, or
merely to continue peaceful relations and further economic
exchanges. The first foreign ministry was created in Paris by
Cardinal Richelieu in 1626. Other European countries followed the
French example. As absolute monarchs gave way to constitutional
monarchies and republics, embassies and legations became more
institutionalized all over Europe, and by the end of the
nineteenth century European-style diplomacy had been adopted
throughout the world.
1. I have witnessed this evolution of diplomacy both as a citizen and as a diplomat. As the latter, I discussed this development on several occasions with George F. Kennan, one of America's top diplomats and a scholar of diplomacy, who was ambassador in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, from 1961 to 1963 while I was the senior public diplomat at the embassy.
Large countries had
embassies in other large countries and legations in smaller
states. Embassies were headed by ambassadors and legations by
ministers. Embassies and legations were strictly limited in their
contacts with the ordinary citizens of the receiving state. These
limitations were codified in the Havana Convention of 1927, which
under the heading “Duties of Diplomatic Officers”
stated that these officers must not interfere in the internal
affairs of the receiving state and must confine their relations
to the foreign ministry of the host state. Thus, in their host
country, diplomatic personnel from abroad had no relations with
the public at large. National day celebrations at an embassy or
legation were attended (aside from other diplomats) by locally
resident citizens from that country and, for protocol reasons, by
officials of the foreign ministry of the receiving state. What a
difference from today, when our Fourth of July celebrations
overseas are heavily attended by citizens — prominent or
otherwise — from the host country.
II
I was born in Austria.
My father was a reasonably well-known personality in Vienna
— a former professor, later the editor in chief of a
respected economic weekly, and a playwright. My parents were
socially quite active. Never once did I hear them say that they
had been invited to an embassy or legation, or that they had met
an ambassador or minister of a foreign country. My father once
observed that there were two American envoys in Vienna —
the minister (the United States had a legation in Vienna at that
time) and the resident New York Times correspondent. He was
acquainted with the latter but apparently did not know the
former.
I, who was interested
in international affairs, never visited a legation in Vienna
— except when I needed a visa. I remember once calling the
American legation because I wanted to write a letter to a man
from Chicago whom I had met on a vacation and inquired whether
they had a Chicago telephone book. No, they did not, but they
told me they had one from New York. Upon leaving Austria, I
studied in Cambridge, England. I do not remember a single
instance when an ambassador or embassy officer accredited to the
Court of St. James’s came to Cambridge for a conference, a
speech, or a debate during my years there. That was simply not
done prior to World War II.
If we were not exposed
to foreign propaganda — and my interpretation of that word
is totally benign — by embassies and legations, were there
other foreign influences that we felt in our daily lives? Radio,
invented late in the nineteenth century, gave one state the means
to reach the people of another country without immigration and
customs controls and without involving local diplomatic missions.
However, it was initially used for that purpose only by two
totalitarian regimes: the Soviet and later the Nazi governments.
At that time, broadcasts were generally transmitted only in the
local languages with no intention of their being heard in other
countries. The Soviet and Nazi radio organizations violated that
principle and broadcast in languages other than their own. But
everyone — on whatever political side the listener stood
— knew the Soviet and Nazi intentions. Only when Nazi
broadcasts became too meddlesome did Western countries begin to
broadcast in languages other than their own — with the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) leading the way in the
last years before the outbreak of World War II. The funds for
those broadcasts were provided by the British Foreign Office.
That office likewise furnished resources for the British Council,
an organization also created before World War II to further
British cultural relations with foreign countries. Both the BBC
External Service and the British Council still exist today. Radio
broadcasts to, and cultural relations with, foreign countries are
very much part of British public diplomacy, financed by (although
not located in) the Foreign Office.
Nazi propaganda (here
my interpretation of the word is by no means benign),
particularly in Latin America, had an impact also on the United
States. As a counter-measure, President Franklin Roosevelt in
1938 established an Inter-Departmental Committee for Scientific
and Cultural Cooperation, and the State Department created a
Division of Cultural Relations. It also began in the late
thirties, as an antidote to Nazi efforts, to send information
materials to American missions abroad with the intention of
having them distributed not only to officials of the host country
and to diplomats but also to press organizations. In 1940, after
the Nazis occupied France and the Low Countries, a new agency was
established, later known as the Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller. Its mission was to further
hemispheric solidarity, including cultural relations with Latin
American states. The targets were not only the governments but
also opinion leaders and the populations at large through the
establishment of American and binational libraries. Also at that
time, the State Department decided to create press attaché
positions, at first in three US missions in Latin America:
Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Parallel discussion took place in the
State Department regarding creating cultural attaché
posts, but Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith voiced
doubts since the term had acquired “a certain amount of
odium.” Prior to his post as assistant secretary,
Messersmith was American minister in Vienna. From that vantage
point he could observe how the German government had recruited
Nazi party propagandists for cultural attaché posts in its
embassies and legations. (Cultural relations officers —
that was their title then — were finally appointed in 1941
at several US missions in Latin America and subsequently at other
American embassies and legations).
The Second World War
had not yet engulfed the United States, but peace no longer
dominated the atmosphere in America; hence the restrictions on
diplomacy were loosened. Government-to-people activities that
previously were acceptable only in wartime were allowed. There is
a long history of such activities during hostilities, often
called psychological warfare or morale operations, going back to
the ancient Greek states when it was common for one country to
try to break the will of the people of an enemy state during war.
Homer described soldiers carving messages in stone in an attempt
to persuade enemy fighters to abandon resistance. A couple of
weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,
Roosevelt created the Coordinator of Information, which was
largely an intelligence agency, headed by Col. “Wild
Bill” Donovan. But it also contained a Foreign Information
Service (FIS) under playwright Robert Sherwood, who, among other
activities, reorganized the dispatch of information materials to
US missions abroad. By that time, however, their reach was
limited due to wartime conditions almost everywhere in the world.
Within a few months, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United
States itself was at war.
In 1942, three years
after immigrating to the United States, I joined what later
became the Voice of America, a radio organization established a
few weeks after Pearl Harbor within Sherwood’s FIS, through
which the American government attempted, via shortwave, to reach
the people of many countries.The Second World War had not yet
engulfed the United States, but peace no longer dominated the
atmosphere in America; hence the restrictions on diplomacy were
loosened. Government-to-people activities that previously were
acceptable only in wartime were allowed. There is a long history
of such activities during hostilities, often called psychological
warfare or morale operations, going back to the ancient Greek
states when it was common for one country to try to break the
will of the people of an enemy state during war. Homer described
soldiers carving messages in stone in an attempt to persuade
enemy fighters to abandon resistance. A couple of weeks after
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt created
the Coordinator of Information, which was largely an intelligence
agency, headed by Col. “Wild Bill” Donovan. But it
also contained a Foreign Information Service (FIS) under
playwright Robert Sherwood, who, among other activities,
reorganized the dispatch of information materials to US missions
abroad. By that time, however, their reach was limited due to
wartime conditions almost everywhere in the world. Within a few
months, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States itself
was at war. In 1942, three years after immigrating to the United
States, I joined what later became the Voice of America, a radio
organization established a few weeks after Pearl Harbor within
Sherwood’s FIS, through which the American government
attempted, via shortwave, to reach the people of many
countries.
III
When the Second World
War ended, an amazing development occurred. Diplomacy was
reestablished, but the government-to-people programs, previously
confined to wartime, continued. There are several theories as to
why this happened. The two most often cited are that the war had
speeded up the information revolution, which now dominated
practically the entire globe, and that the world was basically
divided into Western and Soviet orbits, with both trying to
extend their influence.
Particularly in the
defeated countries, the victorious powers launched large
information and cultural programs to steer these countries in the
direction of the occupying states. Such programs were instituted
not only in Germany, Austria, and Japan but also in other
countries, whether friendly, neutral, or not so friendly. The
positions of press and cultural attachés, which had been
the subject of intense deliberations only a few years previously,
were added to embassy staffs as a matter of course. Nobody talked
about the Havana Convention. In fact, in my professional career I
never heard it referred to by either the United States or foreign
sides. While it was normal before World War II to expect an
embassy to confine its relations to the host government, it was
suddenly perfectly acceptable to add an embassy-to-people element
in the mission’s staffing. Also, it had become customary
that countries around the world would broadcast on shortwave to
other countries, not only in the sending country’s language
but also in other languages, which, under the Havana Convention,
would have been regarded as interference in a country’s
internal affairs. Thus, the Voice of America, a wartime creation,
stayed in operation after World War II ended — and is still
today an important American public diplomacy tool. When Austria
reopened its legation in Washington in 1946, a curious event
occurred: the Austrian government sent the press attaché
to advance the effort, not the administrative officer or the
political officer. Obviously, Austria believed its most important
task in Washington was to further its image, which had been so
badly damaged before and during the Second World War.
IV
As embassies and
legations around the world expanded their information and
cultural activities aimed at the people of the host countries, an
interesting phenomenon became apparent: the Soviet Union and its
satellites became avid supporters of the objectives of the old
Havana Convention. Press and cultural attachés, they said,
were perfectly acceptable at embassies and legations but they had
to confine their activities to officials of the host country. And
they had to be diplomats, that is, members of the foreign office
of the sending country. That became a problem when the US
Information Agency (USIA) was created in 1953 and information
activities were transferred from the State Department to USIA.
The Soviets refused to grant USIA officers diplomatic status,
resulting in the ridiculous situation where USIA officers
appointed to serve in the American embassy in Moscow had to be
transferred literally to the State Department payroll in order to
be assigned to the Soviet capital.
During my tour in
Yugoslavia in the 1960s, I encountered similar restrictive
problems. Even though Yugoslavia had been expelled from the
Soviet bloc in 1948, it continued to have a communist regime. I
was called to the foreign office several times and told that I
had overstepped my diplomatic status when I had invited a
Yugoslav journalist to lunch or spoken to a theater director
about putting on an American play. Foreign office officials would
tell me that I was in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic Relations. There is nothing in the text of that
convention that would exclude public diplomacy functions of a
diplomat. As a matter of fact, a paragraph of the convention
states that a diplomat’s function included “promoting
friendly relations between the sending State and the receiving
State, and developing their economic, cultural and scientific
relations.” Surprisingly, this paragraph was proposed by
the Yugoslav delegation to the Vienna conference. Had the
Yugoslavs done their homework and had they quoted to me the 1927
Havana Convention, they would have been on much firmer
ground.
In 1961, the Yugoslav
attitude toward public diplomacy activities of foreign embassies
in Belgrade manifested itself in the passage of a press law that
restricted diplomatic personnel from any relationship with the
Yugoslav public at large. Under that law, diplomats were
prohibited from communicating with the Yugoslav people. A
diplomat’s function was to speak to the Yugoslav foreign
office. All information and cultural programs directed at the
Yugoslav people were to be conducted by nondiplomats. That
essentially put the public diplomacy activities of the United
States out of business. The British programs, however, were
allowed because the British Council representative was not a
member of the British diplomatic service. The country most
affected was the United States. When we protested the law,
Yugoslav officials told us that it was enacted because the Soviet
embassy interfered in Yugoslav internal affairs. (I am quite
certain that the Yugoslavs told the Russians that the law was
directed at us). It was at that time that George Kennan arrived
in Belgrade as President John Kennedy’s ambassador. Kennan,
who had joined the US Foreign Service in the mid-1920s
immediately after graduating from Princeton University, still
believed in the old interpretation of diplomacy, namely, that it
was confined to a government-to-government relationship. After
all, prior to coming to Belgrade, he had not been exposed to the
information revolution in his diplomatic career. After World War
II, he had served twice in Moscow — a highly restrictive
atmosphere — the second time as ambassador, and left the
Foreign Service in 1953 to join the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton.
In Belgrade he found
himself in charge of an embassy organization the likes of which
he had never encountered before: a relatively large information
and cultural program with several USIA officers integrated into
his embassy. I do not think he believed initially that they ought
to be diplomats. He most likely sympathized with the British
system in which the British Council conducted the cultural
program overseas outside the embassies. As far as the press was
concerned, Kennan was truly the traditional diplomat. He did not
think that the press ought to be privy to diplomatic exchanges.
He kept away from the American press and was bemused by our
relations with the Yugoslav press. Initially, he did not think
that diplomats ought to engage in these kinds of activities, but
he was rather proud that his embassy conducted cul- tural and
information programs. He soon realized that diplomacy had
fundamentally changed since the twenties and thirties when he was
a rising star in the US Foreign Service.
Kennan’s
reaction to the Yugoslav press law promulgated shortly before his
arrival in Belgrade was curious. I have always believed that at
first he actually agreed with the law’s objective. But
since this was a direct challenge to his embassy, he effectively
supported the public diplomacy staff and its directorate in
Washington and was most helpful in assisting us in formulating a
“Balkan solution,” which allowed us to continue to
operate, albeit under different organizational provisions. In his
own mind, Kennan split his personality between Kennan the
diplomat and Kennan the historian and scholar. One day he
mentioned to me that the Yugoslavs had so far failed to recognize
him as a scholar. Why, he asked, had Belgrade University not
invited him to speak there? I replied that to the Yugoslavs he
was the ambassador of the United States and his relations were
with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or, if necessary, with Tito,
the chief of state, personally. But, I added, if he wanted an
invitation, it probably could be arranged. And so it was. Kennan
gave two brilliant lectures (in Serbo-Croatian, albeit with a
Russian accent — he was completely fluent in Russian) that
were later published as a book. He compared the visits of two
Frenchmen in the nineteenth century, one to the United States
(Tocqueville) and the other to Russia (Marquis de Custine) and
their impressions as contained in their respective books. Kennan
rationalized that he did not lecture as ambassador but as a
professor of the Institute for Advanced Study.
V
After the Second World
War, when it became acceptable, in peacetime, for one government
to try to influence the people of another country and to do this
from an embassy, the nature of diplomacy had fundamentally
changed. The programs that were used for this
government-to-people relationship were originally called
“information and cultural programs.” But within a
relatively short time, professionals of the information and
cultural activities realized that these programs were an integral
part of diplomacy and hence began to call them cultural
diplomacy. Soon, however, it became apparent that this was too
narrow a term because it did not seem to include international
broadcasting and the policy information (press attaché)
functions. By the late sixties, the broader term public diplomacy
was accepted by more and more professionals. Indeed, a major
study in 1975 on the future of the US information and cultural
programs chaired by Frank Stanton (former president of CBS), with
me as project director, used the term public diplomacy for these
activities. When two years later the House International
Relations Subcommittee under the chairmanship of Congressman
Dante Fascell (Democrat of Florida) conducted hearings on the
subject, they were called “Public Diplomacy and the
Future.” However, not until the tragic events of 9/11 was
the term public diplomacy accepted by the American press and,
indeed, within the US government. Now it has become a household
word. If public diplomacy is an integral part of diplomacy, it is
logical that the “old” (that is, traditional)
diplomacy had to undergo a change, too. And indeed it has. For
example, the role of an ambassador has changed enormously.
Whereas before World War II embassies and legations were almost
exclusively staffed by State Department employees, in
today’s embassies only a minority of employees are State
officers. The majority is now made up of employees of other
departments, including Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce,
Labor, and Agriculture as well as staff from the Central
Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
ambassador has become the manager of diverse components of US
government employees.
The information
revolution has shifted the negotiating role from the embassies to
Washington and turned the secretary of state into the principal
negotiator. He or she can travel at the spur of the moment to any
crisis center in hours; he or she can pick up the telephone and
talk on secure lines to his or her counterpart, or even interact
through a videoconference. Because public diplomacy now plays
such an important role in every embassy’s activities, the
ambassador’s public outreach role has expanded. While the
traditional objective of maintaining a good relationship with the
host foreign office continues, in today’s environment an
ambassador also strives to achieve a friendly press and to be
accepted by the cultural community of the host
country.
In each capital of the
world the inclusion of public diplomacy in the concept of
diplomacy has had its repercussions. As far as this country is
concerned, many learned papers have been written by governmental
and nongovernmental organizations strongly suggesting that the
antiquated culture of the State Department has to change. While
some progress is noticeable, a lot of work is still ahead.
Diplomacy has been defined as one of several means by which
countries pursue their foreign policy objectives. Its history is
full of successes as well as failures. All the diplomacy in the
world could not prevent World War I or World War II. On the other
hand, diplomacy (including public diplomacy) was successful in
keeping the Cold War from escalating into a hot war, with the
Cuban missile crisis as a prime example.
American
diplomacy’s newest challenges are terrorism and
anti-Americanism. Traditional diplomacy is hard at work to
prevent terrorism, and public diplomacy invests a great deal of
effort to reduce anti-Americanism. Much has been said recently
that anti-Americanism abroad is due to the failure of public
diplomacy. This, of course, is nonsense — as is the
proposition that public diplomacy can eradicate anti-Americanism.
Research has shown that the causes of anti-Americanism are varied
but mostly policy related. If sufficiently financed and properly
executed, public diplomacy can dampen these sentiments by
attempting to deal with the causes of anti-Americanism. The
United States is, of course, not going to change its policies
just because other peoples do not like them. But in formulating
and articulating our policies, we can keep the views of others in
mind. Indeed, we have always done so as far as the opinions of
foreign governments are concerned. In today’s information
age, however, we must also consider the views of foreign peoples,
because of their rising influence upon their governments, even in
autocratic countries. Skillfully conducted and adequately
resourced, this “new diplomacy” — of which
public diplomacy has become an integral part — will
continue to contribute toward a safer and more peaceful
world.
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