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Chapter 12 | Robin Higham (continued) But heads up! It is important not to confuse the notion of Cultural Diplomacy with the notion of International Cultural Relations. International Cultural Relations, as funded and encouraged by national governments, generally have a different objective, cultural development..., that of building a country’s competence and capacity for its own artistic expression through international exposure and collaborations abroad with other artistic or cultural professionals. The Alliance française, the Goethe Institute, the British Council, the Japan Foundation and even Canada Council were founded in varying degrees on the cultural development/international cultural relations rationale and less as tools designed exclusively for cultural diplomacy. Notwithstanding their differing primary objectives, Cultural Diplomacy and International Cultural Relations are intimately linked and can in fact lead to similar kinds of initiatives abroad. Activities undertaken in either file (or either budget line) almost always deliver important benefits to the objectives of the other. It is difficult in fact to avoid the by-product benefits of “making oneself interesting” in a foreign policy sense when engaging in a cultural exchange with far more altruistic objectives. And the opposite is equally true: mobilizing cultural professionals to “make us interesting”cannot but help to build the experience and capacities of a nation’s artists to discover, express and refine their own cultural character. But the challenge for foreign policy policy-makers and for those who would influence them, has always been to understand the subtle but distinct objectives of the separate activities, and the consequent distinct centres of policy responsibility and budget lines. But, alas, these two files do share, along with most other cultural programs of governments in Canada, one unfortunate stigma. The costs of delivering their programs and policies are inescapably measurable in monetary terms whereas the benefits are stubbornly measurement-resistant when using a dollars accounting yardstick. The consequence of that shared stigma, the costs-benefits handicap, is well known amongst arts professionals everywhere. When times are tough, the tough cuts start here. 3. a glance at four successful national cultural diplomacy models France, the country which can claim to have invented the idea of cultural diplomacy, still puts about one third of its foreign affairs budget into cultural and academic relations (at one point recently, that one third was the equivalent in spending power of the total Canadian Foreign Affairs budget). The French have a Mission civilisatrice which quite simply seeks to demonstrate and generate respect for French artistic and intellectual supremacy. The effectiveness of maybe three centuries of French cultural diplomacy is so persuasive that many other European countries have been pulled into its vortex. Many governments try, few succeed, to compete with the French model on its terms rather than on their own. If one ever needed persuading that cultural diplomacy has exploitable economic or trade consequences, just note that we pay more for a litre of French “designer” bottled water than we do for a litre of high-octane for the BMW. And the high octane is 75% domestic tax. That Mission civilisatrice translates just as effectively to foreign exchange earnings power through international markets for French fashion, jewellery, wine, food products... in fact the high-end of almost the entire spectrum of “essential” luxury products and, of course, tourism. A love of French culture has long established it as by far the number one world tourist destination. The USA feels the need for neither international intellectual supremacy nor a domestic ministry of cultural affairs. But the Americans have decided that cultural diplomacy is becoming so important that their State Department has taken full control of the venerable US Information Service. The State Department is now training its diplomats as never before, about how to employ cultural diplomacy in the advancement of many of its objectives abroad. But we are not in French territory here. The motivation is largely driven by a desire to demonstrate the US Model of Democratic Capitalism... the model of the supremacy of private enterprise. Why is there no need for a cultural ministry to back it up? Because, as somebody we all know once said, “the medium is the message”... the US government’s cultural diplomacy partners for helping the world to understand the benefits of US democratic capitalism, are the American entertainment/cultural industries themselves. |
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