The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which reports to President Bush, published a report yesterday on (you guessed it) public diplomacy – specifically, on the human resources dimension of the challenge.
As Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner reports, one of the report’s key concerns is that there isn’t enough dedicated resource available for US public diplomacy work. While public diplomacy officers want to prioritise communicating with people where they’re based, they can’t – because “90% of their job descriptions and work requirements are something else, like administration”. The report worries “there is no one overseas whose primary job responsibility is to interface with foreign audiences”.
Moreover, Armstrong continues, PD officers find their career tracks hampered in DC as well. People on the public diplomacy track face a glass ceiling; no public diplomacy officer has ever become the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; public diplomats are under-represented in senior management compared to other career tracks like economics, political, consular and management.
It’s easy to see why the Advisory Commission would be worried if public diplomats “view themselves, and are viewed by others, more as managers and administrators than as expert communicators”; likewise, it’s hard to argue against the idea that everyone who works on public diplomacy should “have at least one work requirement entailing substantive engagement with the host country public”.
Where I diverge from the Commission, though, is over their acceptance that public diplomacy can be seen as a separate discipline from other parts of diplomacy – and above all the political component. Armstrong thinks that “the problem is perhaps that State went too far to integrate public diplomacy, pushing a square peg into a round hole”. But you can argue the converse, too: that in today’s world there will never be a neat line between work with politicians on one hand and work with the media and with diverse publics on the other; that all of these tasks take place within the same political discourse; and that in all of these contexts, the core task and skill-set is the same: influence.
Sure, it’s a problem if State doesn’t “recruit for public diplomacy, test for public diplomacy, train for public diplomacy”. But I’m not sure that any of those three things has to imply a separate cadre of people. The implication of the ‘civilian surge‘, of a 24 hours news cycle, of the globalisation of risk and the erosion of borders may be that public diplomacy is – simply – tomorrow’s diplomacy.
