Nov
15
Always Blame the Americans
Filed Under Diplomacy & History | 1 Comment
…cause even when you’re wrong, you’re right…” said the main character in a 1969 Costas Gavras movie. And indeed…why is America viewed so badly worldwide?
The first Chatham House(Royal Institute of International Affairs) event that I attended in London had an intriguing title that left room for both interpretation and analysis: “What is America doing to improve its image abroad?”. After months spent as a grad student of an American university, I was truly interested in finding out an answer to this question, or at least hearing what a “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy” such as the speaker Colleen Graffy had to say on the matter.
I will have to admit that I was somewhat biased in my conceptions about the US when I embarked on this Master Program and most of my outlook on what America stands for and on American values and ways of doing things has known significant changes due to the insight that I’ve had for the past three months. Hearing Colleen Graffy speak about encouraging young people from Europe and all over the world to study in American universities or come with study abroad programs in order to discover US from the inside and not through stereotyping and prejudicial thinking really made me think of myself and my former perspective on things.
First of all, from my point of view, the most interesting element of the conference was the analysis of the concept of Public Diplomacy, a new and interesting term that would at a first glance be deemed illegitimate by scholars because of the mere association of “diplomacy” with the word “public”. Diplomacy was never supposed to be public; it was always seen as an art of establishing and maintaining international relations through the intercession of diplomats, people who would negotiate crucial aspects of the inter-state relations in a totally non-confrontational way. Before being endorsed by politicians and government people, treaties and important papers were always analyzed by diplomats, which gradually placed into the public mindset the idea of diplomats as people who are usually not seen, but who help orchestrate the official actions of a country.
However, in our times diplomacy is a process that no longer takes place exclusively “behind the curtains”, but has actually become a public action. Our speaker, Ms.Graffy, stressed this aspect at the beginning of her presentation on America’s image abroad and underlined the role of “public diplomacy” as an art of communicating a country’s values and messages to peoples in other places of the world. As she interestingly formulated it, thanks to public diplomacy “people can disagree with the United States without being anti-American”.
Public diplomacy was heavily used during the Cold War as a way of getting messages thorough, from the Western World onto the Eastern European peoples who were constantly subjected to the Communist propaganda that depicted the West as the one and only enemy of the socialist state and the main hindrance towards reaching the communist goals. Nevertheless, for a brief period after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was considered futile, as governments thought that their policies will speak for themselves and will freely transmit the message of their states.
This proved to be a wrong move for the Western countries and for US in particular, as Public Diplomacy is a constant process that cannot be “turned on and off” according to the temporary interests of the parties involved. It entails a continuous process of communication within countries, a process that cannot and should not be stopped regardless of what policies are put into practice. Policy-making and public diplomacy should work close together or, the way Coleen Graffy convincingly expressed it – “Public Diplomacy should be there at the take-off, not only at the crash landing”.
Basically, the United States is presently trying to convey its message to the world through a series of channels, the majority of which imply engaging diplomats in an active communication process, in order to get them out of the so-called “Washington Bubble”. This entails a whole range of methods, including providing them with an immediate alert of the narrative overseas through the EUR Alert – a compilation of the news overseas, extracted from the most important newspapers.
Moreover, if traditionally the ambassadors were thought to be the exclusive messengers of a country and the only ones to speak out on behalf of their states, the Public Diplomacy strategy of the US targets all diplomats, who must be present where the public that is absorbing their information is. In order to implement this somewhat theoretical concept, special websites have been set up, with diplomats taking turns blogging about important issues and giving answers to people’s questions and concerns. The main goals of these actions are to have all the embassies officials engaged in communication and to prevent the spread of rumors that have the tendency to harden intro conventional wisdom before they get to be countered through traditional channels.
In order to meet these purposes, the US is presently setting up Media Hubs in Europe and Asia, respectively in Brussels (where a TV studio is to be built as well), London and Dubai. This implies, in Graffy’s opinion, a certain amount of “pre-activity” (a concept situated in between “reacting” and “acting proactively”), of anticipating what the story will be and lining up the voices needed for it to be heard. Moreover, I found very interesting the fact that there are people whose jobs are to log onto Arab blogs (where the information is written 100% in Arabic) and to counter misinformation intended to mislead the population.
From the cultural point of view, US is promoting the English language through language courses in Muslim communities and is trying to engage citizens in the program of “Citizen dialogue”, by which American Muslims travel in Arab countries for organized dialogue with the Muslims abroad. There is also an outreach to women, through the promotion of breast cancer awareness in the Middle East and Latin America and a support for business women in Russia.
From a personal point of view, ever since I first encountered the term of “Public Diplomacy”, the thing that came to my mind was the business-related term of “Public Relations”. Public Relations implies acquiring public sympathy and positive feedback from the public by using of a series of tools that are mainly focused around communicating brand values, engaging the customer and creating a positive image of the company and/or brand. Drawing a parallel between the Public Relations(PR) and Public Diplomacy, I would say that Public Diplomacy does for International Relations what PR does for International Business – bolsters the development of a positive image of a country worldwide.
As a graduate of International Business, I would simply call this “country marketing”. The concept is of utter importance nowadays and it is also essential for building a country’s credibility and image for the ordinary people. Diplomacy itself handles the official ties between countries, but Public Diplomacy is meant not only for officials, but for the entire population, for the ones who are most vulnerable to stereotyping and to absorbing negative aspects that are heavily promoted throughout more or less biased media channels.
From this perspective, US is generally criticized for being too frivolous, having too many religious fixations, lacking values and profoundness of thought, for being too materialistic and too puritanical. Having these traits as anchor points, it is easy to imagine why the term “Americanization”, used in explaining the process of adopting certain features of the American way of life in European countries is always thought to have a bad connotation. I found very interesting a quote from Oscar Wilde that Colleen Graffy used for emphasizing the idea of the bad image of US that must be countered – “America is the only country who went from Barbarity to Decadence without Civilization in between”.
Indeed, America is often seen as the unsophisticated and superficial state that only relates on military and economic power in order to attain its purposes, regardless of the ones who suffer the consequences. However, this image has not emerged solely as a result of a strategy meant to discredit the United States but it came as a consequence of some of the political choices made by the American leaders throughout history.
As much as I have personally appreciated Colleen Graffy’s attempt of depicting US in much brighter colors than its real image, the best example that comes to mind in regard to the way America is viewed by the world can be extracted from her very speech. When asked about the way the war in Iraq is affecting US’ image abroad and attracting negative vibes from the people who are anti-war and who consider America’s intervention in Iraq illegitimate, her answer truly struck me. I have been working in the field of Public Relations for the past 4 years and I perfectly understand that image must be handled with care, that there are aspects that are too delicate to be directly tackled and that there must always be a strategy.
However, I am also aware that the tactic of handling a company or a country’s image must be a sensible and reasonable one in order to attain the goal of shifting the public opinion from the negative to the positive side; it must have the substance and the consistence necessary for rendering it believable.
With this framework in mind, I found Ms.Graffy’s answer not only naïve but dangerous for the credibility of the sheer image that she was trying to uphold: “I may sound idealistic, but America went in Iraq wanting to make a positive difference in the Middle East”. As idealistic as I am myself and as much as I would want to believe the good intentions that led the US into intervening in Iraq, I am also realistic enough to separate economic interests from pure and unconditional humanitarian intervention.
Just as we had debated during the Research Methods class with regard to single-variable explanations, US’ intervention in Iraq cannot possibly be explained by a single-variable; even more when that variable is roughly “making the world a better place”. Clear economic interests, worries regarding weapons of mass-destruction as well as the previous conflict between US and Iraq have all led to the American intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
From this standpoint, one of the first rules of Public Relations is that it is better to give a “No comment” answer or simply to remind the person who asked the question that this does not fall within your range of authority than to provide an answer that will clearly be interpreted as fake and inconsistent with the real situation. I truly think that the same principle should apply to Public Diplomacy as well.
Nevertheless, I am by no means in disbelief regarding America’s good intentions worldwide, expressed in the policies that it is promoting throughout the world. While I was listening to Colleen Graffy talking about Radio Free Europe and Voice of America as one of the main tools of American Public Diplomacy, I couldn’t help not thinking about the days when Romanian people were persecuted by the institutions of the Communist Party or even imprisoned for the mere act of secretly listening to Radio Free Europe. My grandparents were politically detained and persecuted during their entire lives for being “anti-communist” and even deported with forced domicile for 10 years because of their political beliefs.
I therefore know what being idealistic means and I know that during the Cold War Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have done more for the people in Eastern Europe than the US can probably imagine. What is today considered a tool of Public Diplomacy was back then a tool of ideological survival for the peoples of Eastern Europe; it was their oasis of mere sanity in a desert of communist propaganda that was meant to make them lose contact with what was happening in the world, keeping them exclusively connected to the Communist rhetoric. From this point of view, I totally agree that Public Diplomacy was acting for bettering the world; however, that does not imply that America itself always is.
Moreover, Public Diplomacy should never be just a one-street approach, as the negative image that America has in Europe is most of the times counterbalanced by the European conception that America itself has a negative image of the rest of the world. The so-called “American exceptionalism”, seen as a sign of superiority is inherently undermining the relations between US and other states of the world.
Just one of the many possible examples with regard to this matter is the reluctance of the United States in signing the Rome Treaty and becoming a state-party to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The thing that most shocked me while reading about this issue before the visit to the ICC was the assertiveness of the US officials in claiming that “having our American citizens, especially the members of the armed forces, indicted and tried by other than American judges would be unacceptable”. This not only undermines the credibility of a Criminal Court meant to act as a legal guardian for the same world that the US wants to „make better”, but it also sets a double-standard for justice, according to the level of power of the state in question. When a state uses its power to claim a different treatment, the feedback of the rest of the world cannot possibly be a positive one.
Overall, this Chatham House event was extremely interesting for me and I would say interesting for any International Relations student. Public Diplomacy is becoming an increasingly active part of international relations, an aspect that one should be fully aware of when pursuing a career in this field. It was a valuable insight to find out from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy of the US how the mechanisms of Public Diplomacy really work. Nonetheless, it would be also interesting to know how the effects of these actions can be assessed on the long term, if there is a way of quantifying the outcome of the ongoing programs and how they will affect the country’s image in time. If they will truly make the desired change for the better it is still to be seen in the future
Extrapolating from the benchmark of ”American Exceptionalism” and thinking about the final call in Ms.Graffy’s speech, for “leaving the negative conceptions about the US aside and joining in a united effort to face world challenges”, I reckon that America’s image will stop being a negative one in the moment in which the cultural and social actions that it undergoes and its claims for a better world will be supported by an attitude of solidarity with the rest of the world rather than one of domination. For, in my opinion, this is what “united effort” is all about.
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Nov
15
A Big Brokenhearted World
Filed Under Diplomacy & History | Leave a Comment
If one were to describe a visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, words would prove scarce and furthermore heartless and impersonal in comparison to the overall experience it provides. Although the concept of “museum” in itself is more about facts and less about emotions, the Imperial War Museum stands for much more than just the history of war, as by trying to depict the world conflagrations that shattered humankind it also puts forward something even more important - a testimonial of what war does to people’s lives. The kind of testimonial that can cause grief, amazement or shock, but it cannot possibly leave one indifferent.
The Museum includes 4 floors, one Ground Floor and one Lower Ground, each of them illustrating different periods of history and vividly recreating all the elements of the respective eras, hence providing the visitor with a sense of truly witnessing history in a retrospective.
The Ground Floor is dedicated to Children’s War, analyzing the impact of war on a child’s world. An utterly unique and often neglected topic, as usually the war is examined through the eyes of people who were an active part to it. Of men who served on the battlefield, on women who soothed their wounds, almost never of children, of those who knew too little about battlefields and guns but so much about losing a parent, losing one’s home or losing one’s childhood.
The quotes written on the walls and extracted from children’s letters to their parents, from stories of people and from autobiographies are so heartbreaking in their simplicity that even without showing any exhibit from that period, merely with bare white walls and those quotes written on them, ”Children’s War” would still have been an incredible experience.
As I took my time and patiently studied each, trying to understand and relate to the feelings of the children who wrote them, I was secretly trying to discover in them something that would help me understand my mother’s experience. I am the daughter of a deportee. My mother spent her entire childhood in a deportation camp and for political reasons my grandparents were evacuated from their house three times. As soon as they managed to get their lives back on track, they would be evacuated again and be left to start from scratch. This is why, while I was reading the quotes, they all made me think of my mother and, in addition, of my grandfather and of all the people like him, who died with the grief of having forever lost the right to a place to call “home”.
All the time I was evacuated I used to tell myself that one day the
war would be over and I could go back home.
After the war…I made my way back to where we used to live.
The whole area had been obliterated during the Blitz and I was quite unable to find the spot where our house once stood.
That happened more than 50 years ago, but somehow I am still waiting to go home
Jim Bartley, evacuee
This is precisely one of the reasons for which what the Imperial War Museum did with the “Children’s War” is extraordinary; it recreated war through the eyes of a child, presenting its atrocities with utmost clarity. Every person who ever embraced the idea of waging war as a means of solving things should spend an hour at the Ground Floor of the Imperial War Museum; it will guarantee him a different perspective on things.
“It’s a soldier, Mummy, with a kit bag. I think it’s your husband!”
Boy seeing his father for the first time;
Going up to the higher floors, the 4th Floor gathers the exhibition of “Crimes Against Humanity”, which entails a 30-minutes-documentary about the bloodshed in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, or East-Timor. The facts presented there are amazing in their cruelty. Finding out that 60% of the children in Rwanda have seen a person killed before their eyes and that over 40% have seen a member of their family killed before their eyes, truly leads one into questioning whether justice really resides in remembrance. From the viewpoint of history, how could these children ever balance the need of remembering what happened to their parents against the need of letting go as a chance of leading a normal life? This is why one always wonders if people ever learn their lesson when it comes to the tragedies that have shattered the world or if the “Never Again” that we endorse after each major catastrophe remains more of an intention and less of a reality.
Although the 4th floor and implicitly the 30-minutes-documentary about the genocide was not recommended for children under 16 years of age, one would have been surprised to see a group of teenagers who had chosen the projection-hall as a hang-out place, for joking and having a good time. Analyzing their behavior was indeed a bitter enterprise.
While on the screen the stories of people who survived incredible crimes and tortures were unfolding, while victims of rape from Rwanda were remembering their suffering in trembling voices, children with dreary eyes were remembering their dead parents and survivors of the Holocaust were talking about the inhumane conditions in the concentration camps, the teenagers were laughing out loud, throwing empty Coke cans at one another and running around the projection hall. At the same time the narrators, among whom broadcaster Fergal Keane and African affairs expert Alison Des Forges, were talking about remembrance and about the need of teaching our children how not to repeat our mistakes.
This sad episode can only make one even more convinced of the need of lucid recollection, of the need of reconstructing the course of the events and furthermore of teaching one’s children about it. Of the need of “Never Again” assumed not only as an attractively formulated slogan but as an inspiration for actions meant to prevent crimes like these from ever taking place again.
As the visit continued with the Holocaust Exhibition, something totally unique happened during the one hour and a half spent there. It was probably the first time in my life I ever felt like shedding tears while merely looking at picture in an exhibition hall. It all simply got to me - all the images of suffering people, all the pain conveyed by the testimonials, all the unavoidable thoughts of the somewhat similar burden my grandparents had to carry.
Probably the most disturbing thing of all about the Holocaust is simply the thought of how it all started. The thought that human mind can cause pain and suffering infinitely more easily than doing good and that what we call catastrophes are merely the product of human minds laid in the service of evil rather than of the good.
Looking back to history, it was the conditions in Germany after the war that had allowed the Nazi Party to flourish. The defeat in the First World War had shocked most Germans and the transformation of Germany into a democracy had discontented them, all building into the conception of Germany having been “stabbed in the back” by Communists and Jews, as one of the Communist leaders of the revolution was Jewish. Feeding into this prejudice and in the context of economic depression plaguing the society, the Nazi party seemed to be offering not only a political but an ideological support that appealed to people’s nationalist side. The price, however, was infinitely too high.
As the Nazis founded their state on the idea of a “Master Race”/Herrenvolk, superior to all others and made up of Germans and northern Europe neighbors, especially the blond and blue-eyed Nordics, their entire ideology was based on the claim that the so-called inferior races threatened to subvert the Aryan culture and “pollute” the Aryan bloodlines.
Therefore, the purpose of the Holocaust was cleansing Germany and Europe of these supposedly alien influences. Drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and the other crimes against humanity like those in Rwanda, Yugoslavia or the sadly still-ongoing Darfur, everything started from the evil conception of “cleansing” away elements of a society, regardless of the fact that those “elements” are not merely disposable objects, but actual people. The same patterns repeated over and over again, the same allegedly “noble” cause of doing away with “bad elements”, ridding the society of them in order to secure its flourishing. Even the term “cleansing” of a society is chosen in a positive connotation, as if it would legitimize the throwaway of some of its members.
Reading about the deportations of Jewish people to the concentration camps brought back again memories of my family, of the way the communist regime packed up people, including children and old people in cattle wagons, in freezing cold, transporting them to deportation camps as they were deemed enemies of the society. Nevertheless, I am grateful that, unlike Holocaust victims, my family was at least granted the right to life. This is one more reason that makes the Imperial War Museum so utterly important, as by illustrating the war and its wrongs in their entirety it reminds us that no ideology should ever be allowed to gain its legitimacy based on crime.
Going out of the Holocaust Exhibition and exiting the Imperial War Museum, a quote written in big red letters on the black wall caught my eye. Just one sentence that I recognized with sheer surprise to be the life-motto that I had chosen during my high school years and that stayed with me ever since. Reading that quote on the wall, after 3 hours spent in a time-bubble of history, really laid things in an incredible perspective and it reminded me of my reasons for being there. Of the reasons behind some of the choices I’ve made in my life so far. It brought me back to the real values that one must never forget nor forsake, because indeed, “For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke 1729-1797).
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