Last night, I was on Capitol Hill for the launch of the FCO’s new book on public diplomacy. As Alex noted earlier, we have a chapter in the book on public diplomacy and global issues.
At the launch, Jim Murphy underlined that the mission of the public diplomat was to foster “shared awareness and understanding” and to use that to catalyse “common platforms for action.”
But this is, he emphasized, a developing agenda. “No government in the world, as far as I am aware, has by itself managed to develop a coherent theory of modern influence. Nor determined a systematic approach to the practice of such engagement,” he said.
I am now off to Brookings for a seminar that will explore with the Minister what a theory of influence might look like. More on that later, but in the meantime, an extract from our chapter that sets out the scale of the challenge that public diplomats face:
First, public diplomacy is about building shared awareness – a common understanding of an issue around which a coalition can coalesce. The task here is not simply to accumulate information, which often exists in abundance, but rather to invest in analysis, synthesis and dissemination. Are state and non-state actors using the same data? Has a common language emerged? Is there a hub for discussion and debate?
Shared awareness should be the precursor to the construction of a shared platform. The new public diplomacy will usually – perhaps invariably – be a multilateral pursuit. The objective is to build a network of state and nonstate actors around a shared vision or set of solutions: something a bilateral programme will seldom be able to do. This vision or solution need not be provided by a particular government and then ‘sold’ to its partners. The approach is less top-down that that: a really compelling vision will in itself have sufficient power to draw together a network and motivate it to campaign for change.
The end point is institutionalising this network’s beliefs, thinking and structures into a framework for managing a particular problem. Given the amorphous and dynamic nature of the challenges we face, this framework will seldom be a permanent one. Rather, it will involve the creation of a shared operating system that distributes our response to a risk, and is flexible enough to evolve as that risk evolves. The result should be a change in the structure of globalisation, a rewiring of our ability to act together in the face of a collective challenge.
