“Familiarity breeds contempt,” goes the saying. Looking back at the material we have covered so far, one of the central tasks for practitioners is to walk the fine line between making their culture available to others and respecting other countries cultural space. John Brown illustrated the later when he told us about the flood of B-movies going into Russia in the 1990’s. Those movies represented America just as much as any orchestra or dance-troupe.
Unfortunately, the model of PD that Peter Kovach illustrates in “Out from Under the Proscenium: A Paradigm for U.S. Cultural Diplomacy,” goes too far in the other direction. The problem with programs like the basketball trip and the musician exchange is that the more organic they become, the more they lose their message. Presumably, the PD is about building support for specific policies, or engendering a future atmosphere in which a nation’s freedom of action is greater. How exactly the two programs achieved such an objective is unclear. Making friends on a small scale with foreign publics, while a laudable goal, is not necessarily PD unless it fulfils those two aforementioned objectives.
This is an interesting point, J, but it only holds if you assume that the goal of public diplomacy is "building support for specific policies." I think you could easily make the argument that collaborative projects are essential to relationship-building and goodwill-generation, which are separate but equally important PD goals. Obviously greater support for policies and improved international relations in general are overarching goals, but I believe there's a real place in PD for collaborative relationship-building efforts like these.
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