Intermap

By Craig Hayden

Bruce Gregory’s interesting keynote at the George Washington University’s Global Engagement event a few weeks ago triggered an interesting response by the esteemed Amb. William Rugh, a professor of Public Diplomacy at The Fletcher School, Tufts University (and renowned for, among other things, very important scholarly work on Arab media). Bruce Gregory graciously shared this email response, and his own rejoinder to Rugh, so that others in the blogosphere could weigh in.

It should be noted that the exchange was indeed civil.

For the sake of reference, here are some key comments from the exchange, starting with William Rugh, who takes issue with the relationship of PD to Strategic communication (SC):

I will start by quoting Adam Ereli, who is a 20-year Foreign Service veteran, in the PD-cone, who served several overseas PD tours, and was most recently PAO in Baghdad, where he worked for a year very closely with General Petreaus and many others in the U.S. military. He was before that a senior advisor to Karen Hughes and the Deputy Spokesman of the State Department. He is now ambassador to Bahrain. Adam is a Fletcher graduate and returned yesterday to Fletcher to talk about public diplomacy. A student asked him to explain the difference between PD and SC. Adam said something very simple (I’m paraphrasing): ‘PD is diplomacy, SC is not. PD is done by diplomats, SC by people in uniform. DOD regards SC like any other weapon, say a tank, that aims, shoots, hits and moves on. PD is a long-term endeavor. It uses many instruments and the effect is hard to measure in the short run. Because DOD has thrown many more people at SC, real PD is sometimes forgotten, but it is an essential tool.’

PD is diplomacy. SC is done by people who are trained war-fighters. PD is done by diplomats trained to do PD. PD is not done by everyone and anyone. If you teach diplomatic history, you teach about relations between states, because that is what diplomacy is. PD is relations between a government and a foreign public.

I realize that the world has changed with the IT revolution. PD practitioners of course take that into account and use it. And the IT revolution does not make non-governmental communicators into diplomats. Yes, the NCIV participates in PD when its volunteers help international visitors who come to the US, but that is part of an official PD program paid for initially by the US government, even though NCIV helps financially by contributing volunteer time. I fear that calling all cross-border communication PD destroys the meaning of the word diplomacy. I fully agree that non-governmental cross-border communication is terribly important to understand, but let’s please call it something else, not diplomacy, or even “new public diplomacy”

If I may pick one other nit, I have problem with your essay where you quote Monroe Price saying that we need “transformation not adaptation”. That sounds nice but what does it mean? It’s easy to make a sweeping statement and say the bureaucracy needs to change fundamentally and is only doing so at the margins….

Here are some responses from Bruce Gregory:

In my GW remarks, and in my courses and publications, I argue that public diplomacy (PD) and strategic communication (SC) are “analogous.” I do not say they are identical. I chose “analogous” with care to indicate they are similar in function and marked by resemblance, but not by their origin. The central characteristics, time dimensions, and methods in public diplomacy can be found in strategic communication and vice versa. …

You say (paraphrasing Adam Ereli) that “PD is diplomacy, SC is not. PD is done by diplomats, SC by people in uniform. DoD regards SC like any other weapon.” I agree that many in DoD and the military services think of SC and ideas as weapons. But many do not. There are highly sophisticated views on PD and SC in military circles, and generalizing is a disservice….

The following comment begins to illustrate how the question of what a 21st century public diplomacy will look like starts to reflect broader developments in the understanding of diplomacy’s role in international relations.

You also say (your own words) that “PD is done by diplomats trained to do PD.” Elsewhere you have written that “a PD practitioner is a PD professional who has had actual experience doing public diplomacy abroad.” You go on to limit diplomacy to “relations between states” and PD to “relations between a government and a foreign public.”

These statements, in my view, are too narrow. First, they rule out many PD practitioners who are not diplomats (by this do you mean only Foreign Service Officers?) who fit within your traditional approach — Civil Service professionals in the Department of State and locally employed foreign nationals in U.S. embassies and consulates. They also rule out U.S. international broadcasters.

Second, you appear to exclude many others within government. These range from President Obama and Vice President Biden to many in U.S. departments and agencies who “understand, engage, and influence” foreign publics as an important part of what they do, and, yes, to people in uniform who do the same — and who do so in long-term as well as short-term endeavors…..PD of course is done by diplomats. But PD is not done “only” by diplomats.

Your argument begs important questions about the changing nature of governance, armed conflict, and diplomacy. Many scholars and practitioners, more in other countries than in the US, are struggling with what this means for PD and SC. Today, much more governance — the satisfaction of human needs and wants through rule based structures and legitimate interactive arrangements — takes place above, below, and around the state. Most armed conflict occurs “among the people,” not between state-based standing armies. What then are diplomacy and public diplomacy in this context? Just “relations between states” and just “between a government and a foreign public?” I think not.

I believe definitions are important. But my concern here is less with definitions than where we draw analytical boundaries in scholarship and practice. When you scrape away historical contingencies, diplomacy is communication between governance groups with representation that involves principals and agents. As Lund University’s Christer Jonsson and Martin Hall put it (quoting University of Minnesota diplomacy scholar Paul Sharp) in Essence of Diplomacy (2005): “Diplomacy is an institution representing a response to ‘a common problem of living separately and wanting to do so, while having to conduct relations with others.’” How we do this varies with time and circumstance. Jorge Heine, one of Chile’s leading diplomats, states this well when he argues that today’s “network diplomacy” is very different from the “club diplomacy” of the past.

Diplomacy is instrumental. It answers “how” questions, not “why” questions. It relates to governance and politics broadly defined – not primarily to education, journalism, business, and other ways that people communicate within and between societies. Public diplomacy imports methods and norms from these areas of social discourse, but PD is bounded by governance and its instrumental nature in relations between groups. PD is not cultural internationalism. I agree completely that not all cross border communication is PD and have never said so, all of which leads to questions as to what is meant by “citizen diplomacy.”

This response is meant to raise issues in study and practice relating to public diplomacy’s boundaries, agency, methods, priorities, and strategies. It also leads to a central question. Should we continue to distinguish PD from the broader concept of complex diplomacy in today’s multi-layered governance, thick globalism, rapidly changing information ecosystem, and strategic buffet of opportunities and threats? Is this distinction between diplomacy and public diplomacy still helpful analytically? Does it marginalize PD as a profession?

And here is my response to Bruce Gregory:

I am struck by how the definitional debate continues to plague the over-arching discussion of those concerned with PD. Granted, the interagency issue seems to loom large over the policy community now. Perhaps this is because the “reality” of PD for the United States involves the shared responsibility for communication with foreign publics, like an organizational microcosm of globalization itself. Just as globalization and its ICT infrastructure has eroded the traditional domains of nation-state sovereignty, allowed for new kinds of international actors, and imposed the need for more global governance – it’s also highlighted the need for a new kind of diplomacy, venues for communication, and attention to international
opinion.

I recall Jan Melissen’s comments back when he spoke at George Washington Univ… that Ministries of Foreign Affairs around the world are facing a crisis of identity, which explains some of the recent advancement of public diplomacy tools. It should come as no surprise that diplomacy studies within the larger discipline of international relations is also somewhat lackluster. It’s not that there aren’t excellent scholars, it’s that the central questions that reflect the reality of global politics are not always central to diplomacy studies. Perhaps, if our understanding of diplomacy itself were to undergo the kind of transformation that Monroe Price
suggests, we would find diplomacy as proactively defining the contours of international politics, rather than a tool perhaps increasingly ill-suited for the problems that are forced upon nation-states. Admittedly, diplomacy and PD are instruments, but such tools should reflect the changing nature of the actor needing such tools, and, the way in which the actor must relate to the broader “society” (with apologies here to Hedley Bull). As you [Bruce Gregory] said, “PD is not cultural internationalism.” But it is an imperative as much as it is a necessary instrument.

Public diplomacy as a broad concept captures the essence of what other aspects of international relations scholarship already recognizes and you elegantly describe in your letter. At the same time, I should stress that the traditional instruments of diplomacy aren’t going to go away. But the responsibility for these functions, the stakeholders, and the expectations are likely to change.

As for strategic communication, I would say that there are aspects of what the military does that indeed “weaponizes” communication, but this seems like a over-reaching generalization. Strategic communication often works to effect an environment that is a theater of operations – often increasingly *long-term* operations. Its aim is very often to shape the communicative and indeed interpretive context for how U.S. actions are perceived. And sometimes this is used to complement military operations, while in other instances it replaces such operations. As an aside, I think the growth of SC at some level tracks with the militarization of U.S. foreign policy around the world, but that’s a wholly other issue. The point is, SC is needed, because objectives are being conceived, coordinated, and carried out at a strategic and tactical level via the military.

The “success” of PD for the United States is not going to come once a specific cadre of professionals are recognized as important or uniquely situated as the stewards of public diplomacy. It is going to come when leadership recognizes what kinds of objectives and/or policies are really the domain of public diplomacy. In addition to strategy, this leadership should provide a viable direction for how to mobilize existing resources, develop new competencies, and more to point, be able to recognize what is necessary to address specific problems as public diplomacy problems.