So I was at the Confucius Institute at the University of Maryland this week doing some research for my book on comparative public diplomacy. I had a great discussion with the directors of the program. They offered a number of insights and were very welcoming. I’d like to share something that came out of the meeting that adds some perspective to recent US attempts to rehabilitate US public diplomacy strategy. The individuals I spoke with seemed pretty sure what they did was not public diplomacy – and were somewhat ambivalent about the term cultural diplomacy. For the Confucius Institute – their “mission” was primarily defined as education and educational partnership.

Their work is justified around the promotion and exchange of culture and values through education – and the word “diplomacy” seemed oddly out of place. More to the point, I think there was an aversion to thinking about culture and values from an instrumental perspective (read: for the promotion of Chinese foreign policy objectives). I realize there are good reasons to avoid casting your job as a kind of public/cultural diplomacy – but it remains an intriguing question. For public diplomacy to work – does it need to disavow the label? The Confucius Institute arguably does great work, and offers an important conceptual distinction akin to outfits like the British Council: where a cultural diplomacy center sustains its credibility by its independence from government policy-making.

This kind of self-identification sustains the historical difficulty in linking public and cultural diplomacy. This historical trend, however, may be at odds with the nascent “fusionist” perspective elsewhere, where organizations like the US Dept of State increasingly employ the implicit language and strategies of public diplomacy in their redefinition of traditional diplomatic institutions. I’m not sure how these two trends would be easily resolved conceptually or institutionally.

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