Ambassadors to the blogosphere

A wired world demands new kinds of foreign engagement, says Martin Rose

Public diplomacy" is a fashionable phrase among academics, diplomats and journalists, but it is not a new idea. Diplomats have always addressed non-diplomatic audiences. But the radical changes reshaping today's international environment, particularly in information and communications technology, media and migration, are setting new rules. The world's foreign ministries are adapting to exploit, and sometimes control, these new possibilities.

Jan Melissen's exceptionally useful collection describes a world of confusion and change. The phrase "public diplomacy" and the series title anchor a range of practices, from press management to intercultural communication and network-building, into a framework of interstate relations managed by professional diplomats. Globalisation offers new opportunities, but it is not allowed fundamentally to challenge the Westphalian state-based assumptions shaping traditional diplomacy. As Melissen puts it, today's challenge is "how foreign ministries can instrumentalise soft power". But we must focus, too, on the opportunities offered by the fast-growing ICT-enabled engagement of non-state organisations, diasporic networks and individuals. Brian Hocking recognises that mainstream thinking on "enhanced public diplomacy" still rests on "models of public diplomacy as propaganda" and describes a subtler model in which diplomats are no longer "gatekeepers claiming to control linkages with public constituencies" but creators and facilitators of networks including official, unofficial and other actors.

Much of public diplomacy remains properly the business of governments. A US State Department official recently described public diplomacy as having reactive, proactive and "pre-active" phases: the first she defined as coping with breaking news; the second as thinking ahead of the game on short-to-medium term news agendas; and the third as addressing the conditions in which agendas are set and relationships built. She admitted that the vast majority of her department's efforts are reactive, with what little resource remains deployed proactively. The pre-active is an aspiration. This is irrational: investment in the pre-active will reduce the call on the proactive and in turn lessen the need for the reactive, every deployment of which is a signal of failure up the line.

So what is pre-active public diplomacy? Melissen again, on cultural relations: "Engaging with foreign audiences rather than selling messages... mutuality and the establishment of stable relationships instead of mere policy-driven campaigns... winning 'hearts and minds' and building trust." In a world of dazzlingly fast-growing connectivity (the blogosphere doubles in size every five months, for instance) and transglobal, wired diasporas, the criteria of respect and trust are moving away from "authority" towards "authenticity". This is a hard language for governments to speak, and especially so for Western governments carrying the public diplomacy albatross of Iraq.

Pre-active public diplomacy is not about dealing with hostility when encountered or delivering messages to a passive mass audience. It is about establishing mutual knowledge and, above all, trustworthiness by managing well-chosen relationships without overriding short-term objectives. This takes time and an investment of resources and strategic foresight that seems hard for democratic governments. Paul Sharp suggests that hostility to "the West" from some Muslim regimes is "nothing less than a dimension of life - human relations in all their subnational, national, international and transnational forms", and that what needs to be addressed is not Islamist propaganda (or public diplomacy), but "the friendly milieu of ideas and beliefs in which they make their cases at home". A successful public diplomacy here would have to address "the dense patterns of life and ideas that sustain" that hostility.

This is hard for governments. They need partners - often semidetached, sometimes detached. They cannot easily be managed: they must often simply be trusted. Wally Olins describes Business for Diplomatic Action, which was founded by US business to offset the damage done by foreign policy; Alan Henrikson outlines the potential of "niche" campaigns run between focused governments and non-governmental organisations (instancing the Ottawa Process on landmines); Cynthia Schneider, former US ambassador, explores the damage done by rolling an arm's-length US Information Agency back into the State Department in 1999, and the extraordinary potential of cultural work to communicate implicit, understated messages about Western societies.

She describes eloquently the impact in the Soviet Union of the "spectacular freedom" that American writers had to speak their minds about their own government, demonstrating that "the 'free world' wasn't just cant".

Despite its title, one aspect of this rich and enjoyable book is a progress report on the inevitable escape of effective intercultural relationship-building from the diplomatic umbrella. In the "network diplomacy" described by several writers is the next stage of opening up.

But a world of broadband connectivity, global diasporas and instant, continuous information arbitrage will demand a very different capacity for brokering two-way non-official communication and long-term, resilient, trust-bearing relationships; of education and familiarisation that aim, in Sharp's words, at "getting one's own people to take seriously the terms in which others see the world".

Martin Rose is director of Counterpoint, the British Council's think-tank on cultural relations.