Ludovic Tournès, “History of Cultural Diplomacy in the World. States between National Promotion and Propaganda”, Paris, Armand Colin, 2025, 240 pages, ISBN 9782200641856
What is cultural diplomacy?
Classically, cultural diplomacy is seen as a state’s strategy to promote its national culture beyond its borders. By drawing on historiography’s results, which have increasingly emphasized interactions between the public and private sectors over the past thirty years, I have expanded this definition to consider cultural diplomacy as a repertoire of actions carried out by a range of private and public actors with the common goal of ensuring international presence for national cultural productions. These actions are more or less coordinated by the state.
The notion of a repertoire of actions is very important to me; it refers to a set of initiatives that can be developed in an isolated manner or not coordinated by different actors but, when brought together under the state’s auspices, form a coherent policy. This repertoire of actions evolves over time; for example, sports became integrated into cultural diplomacy only between the wars.
It is also important to distinguish cultural diplomacy from public diplomacy, which is often equated in the Anglo-Saxon world. While public diplomacy involves strategies that aim to use information and current events to serve foreign policy, I choose to focus exclusively on cultural productions – language, literature, music, painting, theater, sports, etc. There are similarities between public and cultural diplomacy, such as the use of similar channels, particularly the media, but they do not overlap completely.
Why not talk about “soft power” instead?
“Soft power” is a concept used by policy practitioners to denote a strategy of action. It is a prescriptive, not analytical, concept. For an historian seeking to understand the mechanisms of cultural diplomacy over the long term, the concept of “soft power” explains nothing new compared to the concepts of cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy, and hegemony.
In summary, historians have sufficient tools with the concepts of cultural diplomacy and hegemony – acquired or not. The concept of “soft power” should, in my opinion, be left to political practitioners. It defines what one would like to see happen, not what is or has been.
“The two world wars and the Cold War are also propaganda wars in which cultural diplomacy plays a crucial role.” – Ludovic Tournès
Why does your history of cultural diplomacy begin in the 19th century?
There was probably cultural diplomacy before the 19th century. But I am a contemporary historian and did not want to venture into unfamiliar territory. This choice of periodization is mainly due to the fact that the emergence of cultural diplomacy seems intimately linked to that of nation-states and national cultures. The dissemination of a national culture can only take place from the moment when nation-states become aware of themselves and select cultural productions that they consider, rightly or wrongly, to represent the “national culture” to make them known outside their borders. The affirmation of cultural diplomacy is, therefore, contemporary to that of nation-states, i.e., the 19th century.
This close relationship between cultural diplomacy and nation-states also raises a number of problems for the more recent period when forms of cultural diplomacy emerged that were not only implemented by nation-states. It might be necessary to rethink the definition of cultural diplomacy for the 21st century. I provide some insights in this direction in the last chapter of the book.
If we connect cultural diplomacy to nation-states, does this mean that this chronology also implies a geography – in that, in the 19th century, it was mainly in the West that we found nation-states?
Indeed, cultural diplomacy relies on a geographically differentiated chronology. At the end of the 19th century, it mainly belonged to a small club of powers: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and even the United States, mistakenly believed to have started their cultural diplomacy only in the 1930s. These countries possessed power, the means to project themselves beyond just diplomatic channels abroad, as well as a universal vocation or, at the very least, an ambition to promote their culture.
The colonial context meant that there were not many independent nations outside the West at the end of the 19th century. For this reason, few countries had cultural diplomacy at that time.
In contrast, the 20th century witnessed a proliferation of cultural diplomacy, corresponding to the proliferation of nation-states. While it is true that the 19th century was the century of nationalism, the 20th and 21st centuries can claim that title even more. From about forty independent states at the beginning of the 20th century, we now have nearly 200. As a result, cultural diplomacy is no longer the monopoly of the small club I mentioned earlier but has become a competitive arena whose number of actors has continued to grow.
How do major global conflicts mark turning points in cultural diplomacy?
In the first chapter of my book, covering the period from 1850 to 1914, I discuss what I call proto-cultural diplomacies. I argue that there is a repertoire of various actions, more or less utilized by different types of actors, but not coordinated.
The outbreak of war in 1914 crystallized cultural diplomacy. Within weeks, the various warring states created organizations dedicated to cultural dissemination, with the aim of surpassing their adversaries in what seemed to be a civilization war. Actions that were previously isolated were suddenly grouped together to form systematic policies under government direction. This institutionalization of cultural diplomacy continued during the interwar period and World War II. During wars, the difference between cultural diplomacy and propaganda is almost non-existent. An illustrative example is the Committee on Public Information: it served both to explain to the American and world opinion the reasons for the US entry into the war and played a significant role in exporting Hollywood cinema during the conflict.
The third moment in this history corresponds to the Cold War. It was a time of multiple cultural diplomacy efforts, not only by superpowers but by many other states as well. Declining states like France and the UK used cultural diplomacy to try and regain their place on the international stage. Defeated states like Germany and Japan tried to re-integrate into the community of nations through cultural diplomacy. Additionally, emerging cultural diplomacies have emerged, not just those of emerging states, as usually understood, but also of countries like Brazil, which was an emerging nation in the 1950s-60s, and Switzerland, a developed country but with emerging cultural diplomacy.
This rise in cultural diplomacy over the years is also seen in the proliferation of new actors like Japan, South Korea, and China, who have taken on significant roles in cultural diplomacy in the 21st century.
Can we consider cultural diplomacy in the actions of NGOs, businesses, terrorist groups, or billionaires like Elon Musk who use their considerable financial resources to promote a certain culture?
I argue for a broader view of cultural diplomacy that includes both public and private actors. However, in my opinion, there must always be state intervention, even if only in the background, for us to call it diplomacy. This state attempts more or less to coordinate different actors but is present nonetheless.
A cultural diplomacy without the state and especially against it seems debatable to me. However, it often happens that the mentioned actors are linked to the state, even if it may not be obvious. In such cases, we can certainly speak of cultural diplomacy.
There are gray areas as well. For example, with Musk, who is a private actor but very close to power circles. He was part of the Trump administration for a hundred days, even if his status was unique. When he speaks, he expresses the viewpoint of Donald Trump in one way or another. The extent to which their interventions are disconnected or, conversely, coordinated, with one playing the “good cop” and the other the “bad cop”, or perhaps the “bad cop” and the “very bad cop”, is the issue. This ambiguity is often deliberately maintained.
How can we assess the current abandonment of cultural diplomacy by the US, which, under Donald Trump, takes the form of the systematic sabotage of its instruments?
Donald Trump will pass. There will be other presidents after him who may not necessarily follow this orientation. Cultural diplomacy developed long before him and has experienced various shifts in American history. It can very well rebound tomorrow. It is a historical object, so there is reason to believe that after Donald Trump, others will take care of the US image and revitalize the instruments that Trump has sabotaged.
It is interesting to note that in the immediate post-Cold War period, the two superpowers of the Cold War – the US and the Soviet Union – abandoned their immense cultural diplomacy instruments. Russia did it because it could no longer afford it, while the US considered this diplomacy obsolete once the war was won. However, while the US has continued to disregard cultural diplomacy in the 21st century, Russia has resumed these efforts since the 2000s, even though often its efforts resemble propaganda.
In any case, we should not interpret current trends solely through the lens of US policy. While the US abandons its cultural diplomacy, many countries are investing heavily in this area, such as Japan, South Korea, France, the UK, and many Arab countries.
Does cultural diplomacy, especially in the form of cultural centers, primarily target the diasporas of the practicing states rather than the populations where it is deployed?
Yes, cultural diplomacy targets diasporas to maintain a connection with them but also to make them relays of cultural diplomacy to the populations of their host countries.
While some cultural diplomacies prioritize their diasporas – as was the case with Italian cultural diplomacy in the late 19th century – they are no longer their sole target as their scope of action widens. In fact, some countries like France have a highly developed cultural diplomacy and a historically small diaspora.
What does globalization do to cultural diplomacy? Could it give it unprecedented instruments to spread a national culture globally, but also make national cultures more susceptible to external influences, risking their dissolution?
The idea that globalization would set back states and dissolve national cultures is a discourse I do not adhere to. It was constructed in the early 1990s, after the Cold War, around the idea of convergence between all societies and cultures towards a global economy and culture. This was a narrative originating from American think tanks populated by economists and political scientists linked to government circles, expressing an objective they wanted to see happen, not a fact.
The same problem is found with this kind of discourse as with the notion of “soft power”: they are prescriptive, not analytical. They are discursive productions aimed at bringing about what has been the dream of Americanization since the beginning – a single world, with a single system, and societies converging towards a single way of life. This might have been what some leaders and intellectuals hoped for at the end of the Cold War. But it did not happen.
On the contrary, states are proliferating, and national cultures are far from disappearing. I would even say that globalization tends to strengthen them. It is enough to observe the rise of populism and far-right movements over the past forty years, fundamentally nationalist ideologies. As for cultural diplomacy, we see at the beginning of the 21st century a global trend of more countries practicing it than ever before. This does not mean, however, that cultural diplomacy is nationalist: promoting a national culture and being nationalist are two different things.
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