Requiem for Public Diplomacy?

In the mid-1960s at the height of an unpopular war permeated by unprecedented levels of global anti-Americanism, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee called for the termination of one of the country's most ambitious enterprises of public diplomacy. Enraged by the tidal wave of resentment sweeping through Europe, Congressman L. Mendel Rivers called for the dismantling of American war cemeteries in France and the repatriation of the sixty thousand bodies of those who had sacrificed their "lives to save that nation from disgraceful defeat."¹ Built in the aftermath of two world wars, American military cemeteries on foreign soil were quintessential, if somewhat macabre, manifestations of public diplomacy. In many ways, these vast cities of the dead ensconced the promise and limitations of this much-touted strategy to promote national ambitions by circumventing traditional diplomatic channels and appealing directly to the proverbial "people."

This quest for an unmediated dialogue with the people of Europe by means of the cemeteries was ensnared by a set of familiar issues. To begin with, prospective audiences ignored, reinterpreted, and subverted the intent of the plan's architects. In Europe of the 1960s, a critical public interpreted these signs of American commitment to the Western cause as self-absorbed; they evoked resentment rather than empathy. Given the context of the time, the sprawling necropoli were dismissed as megalomaniac and intrusive. Their sheer size, not to mention the very decision to permanently inter American remains on foreign soil, projected American imperialism rather than altruism. The iconographic elements of these sites were, as well, heavy-handed to the point of inscrutability. Created by joint government-private ventures, the cemeteries were pastiches of classical motifs and indecipherable modernism. Their architecture and art were derisive mixed metaphors, a quilt of catchy symbols and ponderous missives.

The disappointing response to this crowning project of public diplomacy—ranging from the ambivalent to the hostile—suggested that the master strategy for an unmediated engaging of domestic audiences had failed to foster the type of understanding of American goals that its underwriters had expected. To his credit, Congressmen Rivers understood that failure had little to do with the project itself. The cemeteries were unpersuasive because of the political context of the time. Public diplomacy could not function in a hostile political climate, in which the deeds and values of the United States were rampantly unpopular.

When juxtaposed with discontents over the resonance and effectiveness of contemporary public diplomacy, the cemetery controversy appears strikingly familiar. Kennedy and Lucas survey a plethora of familiar frustrations concerning the inability to sell a wary world a product with very limited appeal. The supersized projects of present-day public diplomacy elicit disappointment, borne out of an unwillingness of the Beltway-Madison Avenue complex to acknowledge the limitations of advertising strategies in a hostile political climate.

Of course, not all of the discontents of contemporary public diplomacy are repeat performances. Kennedy and Lucas identify several compelling problems and issues directly related to recent cultural, political, and social developments. In the limited space I have at my disposal, I shall comment on two contemporary caveats—technical and epistemological—and their detrimental effect on latter-day public diplomacy. My comments are born out of an uncertainty as to the fate of public diplomacy and the appropriate tools for analyzing this enterprise. I am unsure whether we should be performing an autopsy, in which the methodological tools of historical inquiry appear most appropriate, or whether the occasional twinge and spasm suggest vital signs worthy of a broader cultural analysis.

To clarify the present status of public diplomacy, I offer my understanding of Kennedy and Lucas's analysis of the inherent tension between public diplomacy's cold war paradigms and the waning resonance of the nation-state. The challenges of nonstatist entities and the heteropolarization of the global arena, they suggest, pose insurmountable obstacles for a mechanism born and bred in the cold war. Public diplomacy is ill-prepared for the transition from a binary arena of...