By Craig Hayden

Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow for the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and the chief global strategist for Dancing Ink Productions, recently posted a short article on the Policy Innovations publication of the Carnegie Council with the title – “New Ethics of Public Diplomacy.” Fouts asserts an increasingly common refrain, that public diplomacy should be about “dialogue” and not about “messaging.” He draws from his report, co-authored with Rita King on “Digital Diplomacy” – that communication must be both “authentic” and “ethical.”

I respect the position that Fouts stakes out in his article. But I think he leaves the question of ethics unanswered – other than it requires some “nuance.” He does draw attention to an enduring issue that plagues the intersection of strategic communication and public diplomacy programs in the United States. In a time of unprecedented transparency of international action – nation-states must act in accordance with their words. At the same time, they must contend with the perception of their status as nation-states engaged in acts of influence. Global audiences are sensitized to being persuaded and suspicious of overt attempts to win influence. The double-bind of being ethical in PD means trying to cultivate credibility with communication that many feel is a priori a cynical attempt at perception management.

At the same time – being ethical means evaluating the relationship between the rhetor and the auditor – just who are “we” and what is our obligation to our audience. These audiences are also not monolithic, but shifting assemblages of interest, identity, and media usage. These audiences do not judge messages based on content alone, but on the status of the communicator within networks (peer or otherwise), the web of relationships and information flow within which audiences seek and utilize information.

Which is why at this point – the discussion of public diplomacy, strategic communication, and influence generally turns on how to cultivate, leverage, or even identify credibility. Steve Corman and the COMOPS crew have done a great job of distilling the notion of credibility to a workable concept for public diplomacy advocates, but I still wonder about the constructability of credibility.

So where do the ethics of public diplomacy fit in this discussion, and how might a concern for ethics influence attempts to cultivate credibility through PD?

1) Ethics could signify the primary motivations of public diplomacy and strategic communication planners – to engage in “conversations” and “dialogue” that facilitate relationship building, and to eschew communication tactics like deception and fallacious reasoning to influence opinion in order facilitate foreign policy objectives. Here, ethical communication is a goal in itself, with tangible policy benefits accruing in the long term.

2) Ethics could mean that if credibility is the source of effective public diplomacy arguments / message strategies… then the methods of public diplomacy should be constructed to maximize the perception of source credibility – by embracing communication outlets and tactics like social networking online, and by facilitating surrogate spokespersons, and by disavowing practices that reflect previous and discredited “propagandistic” media and message practices. Ethics is an instrumental tactic, not a norm.

3) Ethics could mean the commitments to deliberative norms and democratic principles in idealized communication transactions – so that the kinds of messages and indeed arguments presented in public diplomacy messaging reflect certain assumptions about the responsibilities of the communicator to the audience, and vice-versa. Without going too much further into Habermas-territory, I submit here that we can see presence of ethics in the argument construction of influence campaigns, and how they are governed by norms that convey (and perform) the values inherent in the actor and the preferred course of the relationship between the actor (the nation-state) and audience. So here, ethics governs not the policy objectives per se, but the over-arching ethic of communication.

There are other ways, of course, to analyze this issue. But I think it’s important to consider the role for ethics in public diplomacy outside of just “is it black propaganda or not”, especially when ethics must contend with the pragmatics of policy-construction and the primacy of foreign policy objectives. Put another way, can ethics trump communication policy? More broadly, I think ethics also extends into larger considerations of what are ethical acts committed by nation-states – can we consider the manipulation of opinion in any form an ethical practice, when nation-states “target” certain populations? While influence is ubiquitous in everyday life, from the microlevel of interpersonal experience to the over-abundance of advertising, I don’t think there is much of a Star Trek “prime directive” for nation-states acting to influence. But should there be? The instrumentality of foreign policy objectives seem to obviate such discussion.

The “public diplomacy 2.0” perspective forwarded by James Glassman in the last days of the Bush administration was tantalizing in this respect. The “attitude” of public diplomacy was one of facilitation – not message propagation. But Glassman also suggested that ends trumped methods. The goal of public diplomacy was to achieve specific objectives – to discourage and discredit involvement in violent extremist organizations… not to make the United States an attractive nation-state to emulate a la Nye’s notion of smart power.

But does this (admittedly admirable) goal subordinate the ethics of the method to achieve the goal? Following the logic articulated by Ali Fisher on “open-source diplomacy,” the message becomes more effective when it is subject to the review of its audience, indeed, when the message construction is a shared enterprise. In this regard, we can see a truly ethical shift in the purpose and distribution of public diplomacy messaging. But I retain my skepticism – can any nation truly embrace an “open-source” messaging strategy, when ultimately its goals are particular to its own needs? Should the U.S., or any nation-state, pull the plug on a PD policy that is open and inclusive enough to entertain blatantly contradictory messages? What happens when a globally-assembled PD program ends up damaging the desired message? This makes the State Department’s “democracy is” video project contest all the more interesting as such an exercise of inclusivity.

For this reason, I wonder if new trends towards dialogue-centric, or even network-centric PD programs are more realistically just attempts to cultivate credibility for its own sake. The Realist in me doesn’t think this is wrong – PD is ultimately about influence. Community building, credibility enhancement, and the performance of dialogue are all routes to persuasion. My question remains – can we have both an instrumental and ethical public diplomacy?

To paraphrase Murrow, the figure who inspires much of contemporary thinking (and quoting) about international broadcasting, the best propaganda is the truth. But even the “truth” now must contend with the presence of ethos in determining influence. Where then, should analysts locate ethics in public diplomacy besides factual reporting? In Aristotle’s defense of rhetoric, the truth can’t defend itself.

First, and I think obviously, it depends on what one means by public diplomacy. The ethics of information operations is likely different than the ethics of international broadcasting (and yes, I suppose this is an argument for situational ethics.)

Second, I think its relevant to interrogate the assumptions about responsibilities towards the actors involved. Are foreign audiences considered “targets” or “partners?” And are these audiences “publics?” If they are publics – what does that mean? How are publics constituted, and how might PD campaigns intervene or manipulate them? Perhaps more generally, how should we perceive the relationship between media and the information needs of an audience? If we believe media campaigns “do” certain things to “people” or “publics” or “audiences” – what should guide nation-state efforts; what’s “off the table” and what’s “responsible?”

Right now, I think there’s a lot of attention to perceptions about ethics and the consequences for credibility. Josh Fouts probably comes down on the side of journalists and international broadcasters – that we should be sensitive to the perception of our message strategy, and also to our responsibility as information providers. He offers an instructive way to think about that: “But just as reconstruction is a critical part of post-war planning, so too should the quality of narratives be contemplated from a long-term perspective.”

So – the way we communicate sets up the world in which we must operate eventually. Does it matter that this kind of ethical attention may have short term instrumental benefits? I think this reflects a contemporary quandary for nations like the United States. Its current global standing requires efforts to rehabilitate its credibility, but such efforts may be perceived as disingenuous, further reducing credibility. Following Fouts, the “nuance” means attention to two ethical dimensions.

On the one hand, being “ethical” means being responsive to the nature of public argument in the contemporary global media environment. It just makes better sense, if you want to influence audiences, to not be monological in message design and to misjudge the subjectivity of new media audiences.

On the other hand, being “ethical” works to construct and reinforce the evolving relationship between nation-states and other non-state actors. We invite a kind of international relations by the manner in which we set up expectations and relationships through our communication. We invest audiences with agency in the manner of address, how we invoke shared experiences and allow space for shared expression. This may establish communicative norms that will govern future relations outside of just PD programs. While I don’t believe that an ethically-charged (i.e. non-deceptive, inclusive, even ‘horizontal’) public diplomacy attitude will usurp the importance of hard power, material concerns in international relations – an ethical public diplomacy can work to define what matters in the conduct of international affairs.