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A Historical Sociology of the New Cultural Diplomacy Robin Brown 1 Accepted: 25 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract

Although the term ‘cultural diplomacy’ is familiar, it was infrequently used before the end of the Cold War. In fact, practitioners avoided the term and preferred ‘cultural relations’. This paper explains the rise of ‘cultural diplomacy’ via a historical sociology of the broader field of ‘cultural statecraft’. The analysis shows that during the Interwar Period, two modes of cultural statecraft emerged with distinct organizational configurations; ‘cultural relations’ that embedded ‘culture’ within the field of foreign policy and ‘intellectual cooperation’ that sought to de-nationalize culture. Within the cultural relations area, the key relationship was between foreign ministries and semi-autonomous implementing agencies. In this context ‘cultural relations’ served to manage the armslength relationship between the two sides. At the end of the Cold War, changing policy ideas and the emergence of an organizational model based on projects brought new actors into the field for whom old sensitivities around cultural diplomacy no longer applied. Keywords Cultural diplomacy . Cultural relations . International relations . Historical sociology

Introduction On the surface, ‘cultural diplomacy’ seems like a relatively straightforward term. On closer inspection a puzzle emerges. A Google Ngram search of English language books detects occasional use across the twentieth century until the late 1950s, a more sustained level of use in the 1960s and a spike in the early ‘70s, apparently driven by the East-West détente of the period and from 1989 an almost exponential rise. How can we account for this sudden popularity? This new popularity is supported when we note that among the practitioners of what might be called cultural statecraft the term ‘cultural diplomacy’ has historically been seen with suspicion. Writing in the early 1980s, a British Council official spoke for his professional colleagues in several countries when he distinguished between cultural relations and cultural diplomacy and made it clear that it was the former that was the work of professionals further

* Robin Brown [email protected]

1

Archetti Brown Associates, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK

R. Brown

carried a threat of the instrumentalization of the cultural work by the diplomats (Mitchell 1986). True in 1995 the French foreign ministry did publish a volume on the history of French cultural diplomacy, but the occasion was the 50th anniversary of the Direction Générale des relations culturelle, and while that directorate referred to its work with several terms (eg rayonnement, or action culturelle extérieure), cultural diplomacy was rarely one of them (Roche and Piniau 1995). Given this history, the frequency with which ‘cultural diplomacy’ now appears in policy documents and academic writing requires some explanation. The analysis developed here suggests that the rise of ‘cultural diplomacy