Cultural Diplomacy Is Ours

Globalization is a highly contested concept. It is an uneven process, it is quite unclear if it benefiting or harming people across the world, it is not clear-cut whether is bringing a new world order, characterized by multi-polarism, or reinforcing the old hegemonic one. Globalization rises many questions which for the time being are still unanswered. However what is self-evident about globalization is that it is driven by the technological revolution. This is the underlying force of globalization that allows “time-space compression” (Harvey quoted in Baylis, Smith, Owens, 2008, 17), in the form of international flights, international communications and information, the internet as so forth. Globalization is bringing people from different parts of the world closer to each other, and whether this would result in a clash of civilizations, as Huntington foresees, or in greater cross-cultural understanding, as liberals would claim, is still a matter of debate.
It can be argued that cultural diplomacy has a paramount role to play to build bridges of understanding among different cultures and avoid a clash of civilizations. Cultural diplomacy is often referred in the literature as a feature component of public diplomacy (Bound, Briggs, Holden, Jones, 2007; Mark, 2009), or as a form of soft power (ICD, 1999). This implies that cultural diplomacy is a tool in the hands of governments. However this is a major mistake of our century, for the very reason that people around the world are increasingly coming to see governments as a corrupt form of power, and there is a strong tendency to mistrust their activities. As Bound, Briggs Holden and Jones remark, cultural institutions work better than diplomats in times of political difficulties ( 2007, 56). Nevertheless they maintain that these cultural institutions must be underpinned by “strong governance arrangements” (ibid. 64), and this does not solve the general mistrust against governments.
The focal point is that people have been provided with the channels to cut distances, especially through the internet, and we can be diplomats on our own right. This is particularly relevant for two main reasons: firstly within a state can coexist different nations, each of which with different cultures, and governmental cultural institutions often tend to promote the dominant culture at the expense of minorities and to foster homogenization of culture within a state, reinforcing the Foucaultian relation of knowledge and power and therefore non-governmental cultural institutions are better deemed to promote cultural heterogeneity and plurality; secondly the intentions of ordinary people to promote their culture are often more genuine that those of governments, because the latter are mainly concerned with national security, while the former are often moved by the desire to know what is behind their spatial barriers for personal curiosity, will to understand the world and entrepreneurial aspirations.
I know that all this can sound very utopian, but states and governments have been proved wrong in many respects, moved by ideological concerns as it was during the Cold War or by economic motif that have not benefit the people but the elite in power. Culture is ours, of the people, and now we have the means to promote our cultures by ourselves, not to enhance our government image, but to build bridges of understanding among us. Culture is a fundamental defining feature of our identities and I am sure that a great majority of the world population does not accept that governments make of this another instrument for power politics as it was in the case of America during the Charlotte Bear era. The freedom to promote our culture for our sake rather than for governments’ sake could be the key for a pacified world inhabited by different cultural identities that accept and respect each other.

Sources:
Baylis, Smith, Owens, 2008, The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 4th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Bound, Briggs, Holden, Jones, 2007, “Cultural Diplomacy”, Demos, at http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Cultural%20diplomacy%20-%20web.pdf?1240939425.

ICD, 1999, “What Is Cultural Diplomacy?” at http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/index.php?en_culturaldiplomacy.

Mark S., 2009, “A Greater Role for Cultural Diplomacy”, Clingendael Discussion Papers in Diplomacy, at http://www.clingendael.nl/publications/2009/20090616_cdsp_discussion_paper_114_mark.pdf.