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Reviewed by:
  • Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy ed. by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried
  • Nicholas J. Cull
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried, Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. 265 pp. $70.00/ £40.00.

Cultural diplomacy has emerged in recent years as a significant field of both international practice and scholarship. The drivers of this have included an international crisis [End Page 196] allegedly underpinned by a “clash” of cultural differences and leaps of technology that make it possible for members of distinct cultural blocs around the world to experience direct contact as never before. After the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 the United States rediscovered cultural diplomacy and is presently instituting an innovative array of cultural initiatives, including the SmART power program using artists and the Rhythm Road music program organized in conjunction with Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The editors of this volume are themselves pioneers in the reemergence of the field in Europe. Jessica Gienow-Hecht has written widely on the history of cultural diplomacy, including the recent Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in German-American Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), and Mark Donfried has sought to promote and refine the practice of cultural diplomacy from his position at the helm of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin. The present volume is an anthology of papers presented at a conference on cultural diplomacy and international history that the editors organized in Frankfurt in December 2005.

Although cultural diplomacy has achieved a certain prominence in Cold War historical discourse, this anthology is not a rehash of the familiar discussion of the cultural Cold War of the 1950s. The editors make no secret of their wish to rescue cultural diplomacy from the clutches of scholars of the United States and especially its approach to Europe during the Cold War. Only one contribution treads familiar territory: James Vaughan’s excellent essay on the limits of U.S. cultural diplomacy in the Middle East in the 1950s. Most of the remaining essays illuminate lesser-known aspects of Cold War cultural diplomacy scholarship, beginning with Jean-François Fayet’s treatment of the Soviet cultural propaganda bureau VOKS and Rosa Magnúsdóttir’s account of Soviet attempts to promote socialist values in the United States in the later 1950s. Anikó Macher’s chapter on the absence of Hungarian cultural diplomacy in the years following the 1956 Soviet invasion is a fascinating snapshot of practice within the Warsaw Pact. Annika Frieberg’s treatment of the cultural diplomacy outreach toward the Eastern bloc undertaken by West German Catholics in the middle years of the Cold War is a valuable case study of civil society diplomacy. Besides the excellent introductory survey by Gienow-Hecht and Donfried, only three chapters strike out into non–Cold War territory: Jennifer Dueck on French cultural diplomacy toward Syria and Lebanon under the mandate; Yuzo Ota on prewar Japan; and a theoretical piece by Maki Aoki-Okabe, Yoko Kawamura, and Toichi Makita comparing Japanese and German approaches to cultural diplomacy within their respective regions.

Taken together, the essays serve to remind readers of the value of considering cultural diplomacy and especially of pushing the definition to include not merely the countries seeking to conduct foreign policy by engaging a foreign public through culture but also those non-governmental organizations, regions, cities, and actors of any kind pursuing similar ends. The editors make an argument for best practice in cultural diplomacy, asserting that it is most effective when it is distant from political control and part of a two way process. The present reviewer shares this view, though most of the cases tend to support this thesis by showing the limits of an opposite approach that is too close to government and one-way only. [End Page 197]

The volume, despite its virtues, has a few problems. Some of the essays have grown stale since the original conference in 2005, and though revisions have incorporated a couple of references to material published up to 2008, five years of scholarship have happened since then, causing some of the chapters to...

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