U.S. Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama: Change or Continuity?

U.S.
Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama:

Change or Continuity?
by Philip Conway
[www.circlingsquares.blogspot.com]
U.S. Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama: Change or Continuity?
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................................................................................ II
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................. II
1: INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
TRAUMA AND RESPONSE........................................................................................................................2
‘CHANGE’...................................................................................................................................................6
CONCLUSIONS ..........................................................................................................................................9
2: WHAT IS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY? ...............................................................................10
THE PRACTICE........................................................................................................................................10
THE PHRASE............................................................................................................................................11
Definitions.................................................................................................................................11
Genesis .....................................................................................................................................11
THE THEORY ..........................................................................................................................................13
Soft Power .................................................................................................................................13
Two ‘Schools’ .............................................................................................................................15
CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................................................................17
3: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? ............................................................................................18
HISTORIO-GRAPHY ................................................................................................................................18
THE ARBITRARY SIGN...........................................................................................................................19
GENEALOGY ...........................................................................................................................................20
4: GENEALOGY................................................................................................................21
REPRESENTATION .................................................................................................................................22
Etymology..................................................................................................................................22
17th Century ..............................................................................................................................23
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................27
DIPLOMACY.............................................................................................................................................28
Etymology..................................................................................................................................28
17th Century ..............................................................................................................................29
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................33
PUBLIC/S..................................................................................................................................................34
Etymology..................................................................................................................................34
17th Century ..............................................................................................................................35
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................38
PROPAGANDA .........................................................................................................................................38
Etymology..................................................................................................................................38
17th Century ..............................................................................................................................39
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................41
5: CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................41
STATES......................................................................................................................................................41
PUBLIC/S..................................................................................................................................................43
AUTHORS .................................................................................................................................................46
SUMMATION ............................................................................................................................................51
6: BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................... 55
Table of Figures
FIGURE 1 – BARACK OBAMA, CAIRO UNIVERSITY, 4 JUNE 2009............................................... 6
FIGURE 2 – WILLIS CONOVER AND LOUIS ARMSTRONG, VOICE OF AMERICA, 1955. .............. 10
FIGURE 3 – FRONTISPIECE TO HOBBES’S LEVIATHAN – THE PERSON OF STATE. ................... 26
FIGURE 4 – RONALD REAGAN, VOICE OF AMERICA.............................................................. 52
p.i.
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to everyone at Bristol University who engaged, challenged and
educated me this past year. I am particularly grateful to Richard Little
whose kind guidance has been consistently invaluable.
Abstract
‘Public diplomacy’ is in vogue like never before. The election of President
Obama, the “soft power president”1 has put the subject back on the policy
agenda, Master’s programs and professorships dedicated to the subject
have sprung up across the United States, while academic literature has
proliferated at a startling rate. However, the current literature remains
undertheorised, dehistoricised and, despite the claims of some,
profoundly conservative. This paper is an attempt to open up a more
critical wing of analysis, going beyond the re-constructive critiques of
Snow et al. Drawing on poststructuralist political theory, it argues that
the recent increase in interest in public diplomacy is indicative of a
‘narrative of misrepresentation’, which is deeply embedded in the
American state’s mythologisation. The subject is historicised by looking at
its conceptual roots in the struggles of seventeenth-century England. By
revealing the contingencies inherent but ignored in public diplomacy
discourse, those who would claim its potential as a more peaceful, ethical
form of statecraft are forcefully rebuked.
1
Thomas F. Schaller, "U.S. Needs 'Soft Power' Leader, and He Could Be Our Man," Baltimore
Sun, 21/05/2008 2008.
p.ii.
1: Introduction
F
rom a public diplomacy perspective, the election of Barack Obama
promised to improve in the fortunes of the U.S. ‘brand’ abroad. He
embodied an apparently widespread American desire for
representational change,2 which went a long way towards defining his
campaign and the expectations of his administration thereafter. Whether
the Obama administration has altered the course of U.S. foreign policy and
if his leadership will “turn back the tide of anti-Americanism”3 are
questions of gathering momentum. This essay, however, does not chart
these short-term changes in perception but instead questions, in a longer
timeframe, the desire to make these changes happen.4
From the premises: (a) Barack Obama has promised representational

change for U.S. public diplomacy; and (b) his own political narrative
closely correlates to the ‘mis-representational’ agenda of post-‘9/11’
America, a closer evaluation of what it means to ‘represent’ a unified
national image is demanded. Given that ‘public diplomacy’ is the ‘official’
means by which such representation is supposed to happen, this is the
object of study, narrowly speaking. More broadly, this is also an
investigation of the re-presentational agenda ‘embodied’ by Obama and
the historical conditions of possibility in which this notion resides.
I begin by setting the topic, ‘public diplomacy’, in the context of its revival:
first, in the representational ‘trauma’ of ‘9/11’; and, second, in the re-
presentational promise of Obama. I then evaluate the existing literature
available for understanding public diplomacy, finding it to be poorly
theorised, conservative in historical scope and lacking critical thinking.
The remedy I propose for this is a post-positivist genealogical analysis that
takes the subject outside of its historical, geographical and thematic
2
See, for example: Gary Younge, "'Skinny Kid with a Funny Name' Reshapes Us Politics,"
Guardian.co.uk, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/05/barackobama.uselections20081.
Accessed: 05/08/2009.; Nancy Snow, "Hey World, What Do You Think of Us Now?,"
Huffingtonpost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-snow/hey-world-what-do-you-
thi_b_141669.html. Accessed: 01/0/2009.; Ruben Navarrette Jr., "Commentary: Obama Embodies
the American Dream," CNN.com,
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/05/navarrette.victory/index.html. Accessed:
17/07/2009.; Harry Smith, "One Week in, Obama Embodies Change," CBSnews.com,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/27/opinion/smith/main4757570.shtml. Accessed:
12/08/2009.
3
Heather Carreiro, "Pakistanis Celebrate Obama's Victory," Associatedcontent.com,
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1187578/pakistanis_celebrate_obamas_victory.html?cat
=9. Accessed: 01/08/2009.
4
’Desire’ here does not mean any essentialised ‘drive’ (à la Freud) but simply an historically
contingent, highly efficacious discursive construct.
p.1.
comfort zones by setting it in the context of the political contestations of

seventeenth-century England. In this period I track the pre/histories of
four closely related and significantly constitutive precursor concepts to
‘public diplomacy’: representation, diplomacy, public/s and propaganda.
I find that multiple ruptures and revolutions helped bring about the world
in which ‘public diplomacy’ (as a re-presentational palliative) can be
understood. The conclusions are damning for advocates of public
diplomacy and Obama’s re-presentational agenda as it is found that the
nation-state cannot be so unproblematically re-presented as it is
customarily assumed.
Trauma and Response

Set against the horrors of 11 September, 2001 and the terror that followed,
it seems a little gratuitous to say that this day changed everything for
public diplomacy too – but it did.
It was the day that “changed everything”;5 the event that would “always
be a fixed point in the life of America”.6
As with Sarajevo in 1914, Pearl Harbor in 1941, and Berlin in 1989,
9/11 is presented by pundits of diverse political hues as being a
transformational moment where the fabric of history was violently
torn.7
The day became more than a day – it became ‘9/11’. Although most of the
world was directly unaffected by the events (as was most of America, for
that matter) ‘9/11’ came to exist, for all those affected by the narrative of
American political life, as the moment that changed everything for
everyone; the landmark, the watershed, the jagged cusp of an epoch.
This tall tale emerged from a traumatic ‘event’8 – a ‘surprise’ – that, in

Jean-Luc Nancy’s terminology, did “not belong to the order of
representation”.9 It rendered the existing narrative of American political
life untenable. A ‘reality’ was precipitated “that the [existing] national
meta-narratives could neither comprehend nor master.”10 It exceeded
5
See, for example: Dick Cheney, "Cheney Says U.S. Faces Continuing Threat of Terrorist
Attack," America.gov, http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-
english/2003/December/20031223125302ssor0.59013.html. Accessed: 16/08/2009.
6
George W. Bush, "Text of Bush Ellis Island Speech," BBC.com,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/2252515.stm. Accessed: 26/07/2009.
7
Lloyd Cox, "Review Essay: Reflecting on Globalization and Empire after 9/11," Thesis Eleven
90, no. 1 (2007): p.97.
8
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
9
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p.173.
10
D. E. Pease, "The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement," Boundary 2-an
International Journal of Literature and Culture 30, no. 3 (2003): p.2.
p.2.
what could “take place within the order of signification”11 and dislocated
the American people “from the mythology productive of their imaginary
relation to the state”.12 “Attempts to make things meaningful”, to impose
understanding on this incomprehensible occurrence “began the moment
the events unfolded and have not ceased.”13 Such dislocation and
contestation placed the state in a perilous position; authorities had to step
in and impose order on the semiotic chaos.
Inevitably, the Other was the first to be (un)ceremoniously sacrificed.

President Bush made the following offering:
They hate … our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our
freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.14
This was matched by the media: ‘they’ hate “America and all that she
stands for”15, chimed a USA Today cover-story. By this account, it was not
just those who perished on that day, their families and friends and those
around them who suffered: America ‘herself’ was violated. It was her
history, her values and her ‘freedom’ that lay at the epicentre of the
event/s. It was, therefore, her honour that must be defended. As Bush
reiterated on the first anniversary of ‘9/11’:
The attack on our nation was also an attack on the ideals that make
us a nation.16
Moreover, continued the USA Today story, Americans “should not shrink
from saying” that the American people have “provided more freedom to
more people than any other nation in the history of mankind.”17 The
narrative of righteousness and (most importantly) unity in the face of
violation by an indistinct but fearsome outside force made sense of the
events, narrativised ‘9/11’ and constructed a national identity for this
(in)security era. But these were responses to the questions ‘who?’, ‘what?’
and ‘how?’. Many also asked ‘why?’: ‘why do they hate us?’18 This is
precisely the question ‘public diplomacy’ is supposed to ask, answer and
remedy.
11
Ibid.: p.17-18.
12
Ibid.: p.7.
13
David Campbell, "Time Is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11"
Theory and Event 5, no. 4 (2001).
14
George W. Bush, "Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation," Washingtonpost.com,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html. Accessed: 01/06/2009.
15
"A Nation Worth Defending," USA Today, 01/11/2002 2001.
16
Bush, "Text of Bush Ellis Island Speech."
17
"A Nation Worth Defending," USA Today, 01/11/2002.
18
Fareed Zakaria, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?," Newsweek/Fareedzakaria.com,
http://fareedzakaria.com/ARTICLES/newsweek/101501_why.html. Accessed: 01/09/2009.;
p.3.
It has been claimed that:

[After] ‘9/11’ … public diplomacy was without doubt the hottest
item in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.19
As excessively hyperbolic as that may or may not be, it nevertheless seems
fair to say that:
Terrorism has changed the way people think about public
diplomacy. Today, no serious observer can deny the link between
perceptions of the United States and the country’s national
security.20
It seems fair to say this because this assertion has become common sense.
It is an accepted fact that inter-civilisational (that is, ‘inter-cultural’)
difference led to the events (and thus the trauma that disrupted the
predominant common sense-making narrative) by precipitating
misunderstanding, animosity and hatred. In short it was clear that
difference makes a difference and it is dangerous. A necessary consequence of
this assumption is that cultural difference is a risk and thus the ‘national
security state’ has a responsibility to securitise21 such threats. By
November 2001, it was commonplace to make claims such as:
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 … Americans
now better understand how culture affects the way we are viewed
by some people in other parts of the world. … [W]e must …
nourish a truer picture of American values, American culture, and
American democracy.22
This neatly summarises the reaction of public diplomacy advocates,
however it hardly tells the whole story. The call for outright war was
doubtless louder and more readily received than the communicative
concerns of any peacenik niche.
To simplify the debate, two overlapping and interdependent ideal typical

‘reactions’ can be outlined: The ‘war reaction’ asked the ‘who?’, ‘what?’
and ‘how?’ questions and bore the conviction that, while the Islamist
Other clearly had a false impression of the U.S., this was due to an
irrevocable flaw in its nature eradicable only by quarantine and
extermination. This reaction was undoubtedly the largest, loudest and
most terrifying; however, this American Leviathan was not an entirely
univocal beast. The ‘communication reaction’, asked the ‘why?’ question.
Equally certain of the misrepresentation of the American identity, it
19
Jan Melissen, ed. The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations, Studies in
Diplomacy and International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2005), p.xix.
20
C. Ross, "Public Diplomacy Comes of Age," Washington Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2002): p.82.
21
Ole Wæver, "Securitization and Desecuritization," in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
22
Harvey B. Feigenbaum, "Globalization and Cultural Diplomacy," (Center For Arts and Culture,
2001), p.5.
p.4.
conceded that if large parts of the world disliked America then America
should have done more to promulgate and project its true, likable identity.
This reaction, for the most part, shared the assertion that bodies infested
with Islamism were beyond reason or cure, however it noted the
importance of those surrounding, supporting and possibly abetting the
‘extremists’, directly or indirectly. While misguided, these moderate or
immoderate masses could be shown the error of their ways; the
misrepresentations that infected their minds and their culture could be
corrected.23 Despite differences in the details, these reactions were entirely
at one in their conviction that the U.S. had been misrepresented.
America’s mis/representation around the world became a serious political

issue. A congressional review of public diplomacy, published in 2004,
showed particular concern for ‘presence’ and ‘representation’:
[W]e watched a program … titled “The Americanization of Islam,”
whose theme was that the United States had embarked on a
sinister plot to change the 1,500-year-old religion. The true American
position was nowhere represented. Our views were absent from the
program, just as we are absent … from much of the intense daily
discourse on U.S. policy and values taking place throughout the
Arab and Muslim world.24
By what qualification the U.S. position deserves to be represented in Arab
and Muslim discourse is unclear, however what is clear from this report is
that the U.S. can and must be ‘in’ on these debates and that such ‘absence’
is a national security issue. Moreover it is clear that there is a ‘true’
American ‘position’ to be made present at some (undisclosed) point in
time and space.
This assertion is consistent with much public diplomacy discourse in that

it invokes a singular, ‘legitimate’ identity that has been distorted in
transmission or insufficiently projected by the organs of state, leading to
“skewed, negative, and unrepresentative”25 depictions dominating foreign
minds. In short, such discourse emphasises the state’s duty to ensure the
‘correct’ representation of its nation is made across the world. This
‘narrative of misrepresentation’ is in no small part constitutive of public
diplomacy as it is presently understood.
23
For example: “Bin Laden and his fellow fanatics are products of failed societies that breed their
anger. America needs a plan that will not only defeat terror but reform the Arab world.” Zakaria,
"The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?."
24
Edward P. Djerejian, "Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S.
Public Diplomacy in the Arab & Muslim World," (Washigton D.C.: U.S. House of
Representatives, 2003), p.16. Emphasis added.
25
Ross, "Public Diplomacy Comes of Age," p.81.
p.5.
Figure 1 – Barack Obama, Cairo University, 4 June 2009.
p.6.
‘Change’
Despite the hype and hyperbole and although increasingly ‘polity-
relevant’26 since ‘9/11’, public diplomacy remained a marginal foreign
policy issue. A second event, however, has pushed it further towards the
limelight.
In January 2009, Anne-Marie Slaughter27 wrote that:

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will set about restoring the
moral authority of the United States. 28
On 4th June 2009, President Obama stood before a packed Cairo University
audience and addressed ‘the Muslim world’29 in an act of public
diplomacy of almost unprecedented hype and celebration.30 His stated
intention was
to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims
around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual
respect[.]31
Delivered on his 134th day as president it was by no means Obama’s first
foray into these waters, nor his first attempt to build rhetorical bridges
across them. His first interview as president was granted to Saudi owned
TV station al-Arabiya32 and he fulfilled his campaign pledge to speak from
the capital of a majority Muslim country in his first hundred days when he
26
Relevant to polity rather than policy.
27
(Former Dean of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and current Director of
Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department): "Biography: Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter,"
State.gov, http://www.state.gov/s/p/115437.htm. Accessed: 04/09/2009.
28
A. M. Slaughter, "America's Edge Power in the Networked Century," Foreign Affairs 88, no. 1
(2009): p.96.
29
Although he did not use this phrase in his speech it was implied, he had used it before and it was
widely used by the media. e.g.: "Obama Reaches out to Muslim World," BBC.co.uk,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8082676.stm. Accessed: 17/08/2009.; Thom
Shanker, "U.S. Fails to Explain Policies to Muslim World, Panel Says " NYtimes.com,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E1DC143EF937A15752C1A9629C8B63&se
c=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Accessed: 22/08/2009.; Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Must Counteract
Image in Muslim World, Panel Says," NYtimes.com,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/01/world/us-must-counteract-image-in-muslim-world-panel-
says.html?scp=6&sq=&pagewanted=all. Accessed: 22/08/2009.
30
David Ignatius, "Obama's Preamble in Cairo," Washingtonpost.com,
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/06/obamas_preamble_in_cairo.html.
Accessed: 17/08/2009.; Ben Knight, "Obama Prepares Historic Cairo Speech," ABC.net.au,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/04/2588889.htm. Accessed: 17/08/2009.; "Obama
Reaches out to Muslim World."
31
"Barack Obama Speech: The Full Transcript," Telegraph.co.uk,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5443448/Barack-
Obama-speech-the-full-transcript.html. Accessed: 11/07/2009.
32
"President Gives First Interview since Taking Office to Arab Tv: Obama Tells Al Arabiya Peace
Talks Should Resume," alarabiya.net, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/01/27/65087.html.
Accessed: 17/08/2009.
p.7.
visited Turkey.33 Moreover, his inauguration speech was full of talk of

healing America’s rifts with the world.34 All this came from a man whose
very election, it is said, “had the potential to be the nation’s most
consequential act of public diplomacy since the Marshall Plan.”35
Nancy Snow36 summed up the sentiment of many liberal Americans when

she wrote:
There were many symptoms of Brand America's power loss:
Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Axis of Evil, Shock and Awe, Hurricane
Katrina. Then along comes one guy who steps into this media and
mind space to reboot our national image in … a year.37
For such commentators Obama was “not just “our” president but the
world’s hope”38 – “some believed that literally he embodied change.”39
Engulfed in spontaneous hubris though this appears, it was a carefully
cultivated delirium. Note, for instance, the rhetoric of Obama’s
inauguration speech:
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores … a
new dawn of American leadership is at hand.40
Campaign slogans emblazoned with ‘change’ and set-piece speeches
brazened by an up-swell of youthful support struck a chord most pleasing
to the American political centre in late-2008. The cusp Obama bestrode
was joyful rather than jagged (as it was with ‘9/11’) but equally epochal
was the pretension of the narrative. With his promises to heal historic rifts
wheresoever they lay, Obama’s campaign followed and expanded upon
the recommendations public diplomacy advocates had been making for
years. While he was praised by Snow as “illustrative of new thinking in
33
Sarah Lovenheim, "Potus Events: Obama Visits Turkey," Washingtonpost.com,
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/04/06/potus_events_45.html. Accessed: 17/08/2009.
34
Barack Obama, "Transcript: Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address" NYtimes.com,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html. Accessed: 28/08/2009.
35
Rich Lowry, "In Cairo, a Qualified Success," National Review Online,
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGMzOTBhMDk4OTczNjU0N2U3Y2E3NDk0OTJjOWY5
NmE=. Accessed: 12/04/2009.
36
Associate Professor of Public Diplomacy at Syracuse University: "Center Bios: Nancy Snow,"
USCpublicdiplomacy.com,
http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/about/bio_detail/nancy_snow/. Accessed: 01/09/2009.
37
Nancy Snow, "Brand Obama Trumps Brand America," Huffingtonpost.com,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-snow/brand-obama-trumps-brand_b_160764.html.
Accessed: 01/09/2009.
38
Ibid.
39
Younge, "'Skinny Kid with a Funny Name' Reshapes Us Politics." ; Snow, "Hey World, What
Do You Think of Us Now?." ; Navarrette Jr., "Commentary: Obama Embodies the American
Dream." ; Smith, "One Week in, Obama Embodies Change."
40
Barack Obama, "Transcript: 'This Is Your Victory,' Says Obama," CNN.com,
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/obama.transcript/. Accessed: 01/09/2009.
p.8.
American public diplomacy”,41 he nevertheless fully ascribed to the

‘difference is dangerous’ narrative described above:
So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will
empower those who sow hatred rather than peace[.]42
The problem of difference within state security projects is thus a matter of

significant contemporary interest, as is the role the Obama administration
may be playing in the reorientation of identity politics internationally.
These are the points where the promise of change for both Obama and
public diplomacy meet, the points where ‘change’ as desire is most closely
observable and, therefore, the points which form the focus of this essay.
Conclusions
Public diplomacy, as it is understood and studied today, is inseparable
from both the events of ‘9/11’ and the ways in which being American was
subsequently understood. The ‘narrative of misunderstanding’ did not
work alone but it did provide a means by which the American self-identity
could maintain its exceptionalism by assuming that the violence directed
towards it was born of misunderstanding (and hence a matter for public
diplomacy). Obama has fully followed this narrative. Moreover, Obama
promised to bring about a solution to it by way of re-presentation. ‘Public
diplomacy’ is not only promised further reinvigoration under his tutelage
but it can be seen to thematically, emotively and aesthetically parallel his
own political strategies, all of which links these two objects of study under
the general theme of ‘representation’. Overall, the entire process can be
seen as one of securitising cultural difference and placing the blame for
various acts of violence on that perceived division. While “the problem of
difference”43 is a pressing one (I am not seeking to deny its importance in
any way), its narrativisation within a discourse of conflictual causality is
unproblematised. A closer of analysis of public diplomacy could correct
this.
For fear of false-starting, however, all of this begs a question of

clarification: what is ‘public diplomacy’?
41
Nancy Snow, "Rethinking Public Diplomacy," in Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, ed.
Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), p.5.
42
"Barack Obama Speech: The Full Transcript." Emphasis added.
43
Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference,
Global Horizons V. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
p.9.
2: What is Public Diplomacy?
Figure 2 – Willis Conover and Louis Armstrong, Voice of America, 1955.
The Practice
In Nicholas Cull’s account, the practical components of public diplomacy
are “as old as statecraft”44 and comprise five elements45:
1) ‘Listening’: collecting information on foreign public opinion
(opinion polls, media surveillance, etc.);
2) ‘Advocacy’: directly promoting short term goals (press releases,
lobbying, etc.);
3) ‘Cultural diplomacy’: promoting a nation’s cultural resources
abroad (travelling museum exhibits, cultural ambassadors, etc.);
4) ‘Exchange diplomacy’: reciprocal, strategic exchange of citizens
(educational or professional);
44
N. J. Cull, "Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 616 (2008): p.32.
45
Ibid.
p.10.
5) ‘International broadcasting’: operation of state-run media

organisations to affect local and global media environments (BBC
World Service, Voice of America, etc.).
Although this is a useful overview, what practices are said to bear the
name ‘public diplomacy’ is only part of the story. What matters more for
this study is how the phrase is defined, how this definition is contested
and how these understandings came about.
The Phrase
Definitions
For most writers on public diplomacy, the lack of a clear and widely
accepted definition is a thorn in the side of study and practice.46
Definitions in common circulation range from the simple:
Public diplomacy is the promotion of the national interest by
informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world.47
To the rather more complex:
[P]ublic diplomacy is [meant] to identify, empower, encourage (and
possibly equip) self-organizing systems[, which] currently or
potentially support, directly or indirectly, the foreign policy
objectives of the public diplomacy-sponsoring actor.48
For the purposes of this essay, a typical (though thoroughly contested)
definition might be: ‘the means by which states are represented to foreign
publics’. An exact definition is unnecessary given the deconstructive
(rather than propositive) aims of this essay, however it has been assumed
from the outset that the phrase relates to practices of representation. (And,
more particularly, it is assumed that ‘public diplomacy’ in its latest guises
is a response to the ‘narrative of misrepresentation’.)
Genesis
While its definitions vary, the origin-story of the phrase ‘public
diplomacy’ is deceptively definite. It “was coined in 1965” when Edmund
Gullion founded a center to study foreign policy conducted “through
engagement with international publics.”49 While this was usually called
‘propaganda’, the “negative connotations” of this phrase “placed it
beyond the pale.”50 Instead, Gullion chose to name his new institution the
46
See for example: E. Gilboa, "Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): p.57.
47
Djerejian, "Changing Minds, Winning Peace," p.13.
48
Matt Armstrong, "Defining Public Diplomacy (Again)," Mountainrunner.us,
http://mountainrunner.us/2009/07/defining_publicdiplomacy.html. Accessed: 01/08/2009.
49
Jolyon Welsh and Daniel Fearn, "Engagement: Public Diplomacy in a Globalised World."
(London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2008), www.fco.gov.uk/pdpublication.
50
Ibid. Emphasis added.
p.11.
“Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy”.51 The phrase gradually

entered the foreign policy lexicon over the next thirty years and after
‘9/11’ became familiar to any regular reader of an American broadsheet
newspaper.52 However, “Gullion’s phrase was not so much a new coinage
in 1965 as a fresh use of an established phrase”.53
The earliest use of the phrase “public diplomacy” to surface is …
in a leader piece from the London Times in January 1856 … as a
synonym for civility in a piece criticizing the posturing of President
Franklin Pierce.54
‘Public diplomacy’ as a synonym for ‘open’ or ‘democratic diplomacy’
appeared with increasing regularity from this point onwards.55
This pre-history is not contended but its significance is unrecognised. It

might be a noteworthy aside or a neat introduction but is taken to be
nothing of any concrete consequence. Like so often in the study of
international relations, when the historical is invoked, it simply functions
as a trope that appropriates history’s authoritative weight but remains
detached from the substance of the citation. This ‘forgetfulness’ is
reflected in much public diplomacy literature, most of which remembers
only the Cold War,56 some of which can recall the First World War,57 while
a handful of studies proudly (if anecdotally) recollect the American
Revolution.58 There is little written outside of these historically and
geographically specific enclosures – this highly conservative historicism is
unnecessarily analytically restrictive.
51
"The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy," The Fletcher School, Tufts University,
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/murrow/about.html. Accessed: 18/08/2009.
52
A fraction of the output from the New York Times alone: Weisman, "U.S. Must Counteract
Image in Muslim World, Panel Says." ; Michael Holtzman, "Washington's Sour Sales Pitch,"
NYtimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/04/opinion/washington-s-sour-sales-
pitch.html?scp=10&sq>=. Accessed: 22/08/2009.; Shanker, "U.S. Fails to Explain Policies to
Muslim World, Panel Says ". ; "Selling America ", NYtimes.com,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/opinion/04sun3.html?_r=1&scp=7&sq=. Accessed:
22/08/2009.; Thomas L. Friedman, "Obama on the Nile" NYtimes.com,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11friedman.html?scp=3&sq>=. Accessed:
22/08/2009.
53
Nicholas J. Cull, "Public Diplomacy before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase," in Routledge
Handbook of Public Diplomacy, ed. Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor (Oxford: Routledge, 2008),
p.22.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Gilboa, "Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy," p.56.; Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War
and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-
1989 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).;
57
B. Gregory, "Public Diplomacy: Sunrise of an Academic Field," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): p.276.; Hans N. Tuch, Communicating with
the World: U.S. Public Diplomacy Overseas (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p.14.
58
Wilson P. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), p.14-16.; J. Michael Waller, ed. The Public
Diplomacy Reader (Washington D.C.: The Institute of World Politics Press,2007), p.40-100.
p.12.
The Theory
Public diplomacy as an object of academic study has boomed over the past
eight years. According to some, it “is rapidly becoming a field of study in
its own right.”59 Others argue that it is “one of the most multidisciplinary
areas in modern scholarship.”60 However, upon closer inspection, the field
is profoundly limited. A critical overview of the theory of ‘soft power’ and
a division of the remaining literature into two ‘schools’ will serve here to
establish a critical topography of the literature available, ascertain the
flaws therein and suggest how this essay might depart from these
limitations.
Soft Power
While there are many potential frameworks for analysing public
diplomacy,61 there is no possibility of critiquing them all here. ‘Soft
power’ is by far the most influential of them all and so stands critique in
their stead.
A famous diplomatic aphorism has it that:

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way.62
The same quip could easily be made of ‘soft power’, the primary
theoretical framework currently available for conceptualising public
diplomacy. According to Joseph Nye, one can affect others and thus
exercise power “in three main ways:”
[T]hreats of coercion (“sticks”), inducements and payments
(“carrots”), and attraction.63
The latter is the domain of ‘soft power’ and involves “getting others to
want the outcomes that you want.” This “co-opts people rather than
coerces them”.64 The term gradually became popularised in political,65
59
R.S. Zaharna, "Mapping out a Spectrum of Public Diplomacy Initiatives: Information and
Relational Communication Frameworks," in Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, ed. Nancy
Snow and Philip M. Taylor (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), p.86.
60
Gilboa, "Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy," p.56.
61
For other available though vastly less influential ‘frameworks’ see: Ibid.; Shelton A. Gunaratne,
"Public Diplomacy, Global Communication and World Order: An Analysis Based on Theory of
Living Systems," Current Sociology 53, no. 5 (2005).; John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt, The
Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy (Santa Monica, CA: Rand,
1999).; Kathy R. Fitzpatrick, "The Future of U.S. Public Diplomacy: An Uncertain Fate," (Boston:
Brill, 2009 forthcoming).; Ben D. Mor, "The Rhetoric of Public Diplomacy and Propaganda Wars:
A View from Self-Presentation Theory," European Journal of Political Research 46, no. 5 (2007).
62
Daniele Vere quoted in: Inc. Icon Group International, Mediating: Webster's Quotations, Facts
and Phrases (San Diego: Icon Group International, Inc., 2008), p.2.
63
Joseph. S. Nye, "Public Diplomacy and Soft Power," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 616 (2008): p.94-5.
64
Ibid.
65
e.g.: Mariko Kato, "Both Japan, U.S. Must Improve Their 'Soft Power': Experts,"
Japantimes.co.jp, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090619f1.html. Accessed:
05/09/2009.; Philippe Naughton, "Hillary Clinton Says 'Smart Power' Will Restore American
p.13.
civil66 and academic67 discourse and has to a significant extent become

synonymous with ‘public diplomacy’.68 Although it is routinely taken to
imply the peaceful application of influence, “[s]oft power has a very hard
edge”,69 which is revealed both by its stated intentions and its theoretical
incoherence.
With regard to its intentions, Nye originally coined the term in his 1990
book ‘Bound to lead: the changing nature of American power’ in response to
Americans supposedly being “worried about national decline.”70 He
sought to show that although power “is becoming … less tangible”,71
“American leadership remains essential to the future world order.”72 ‘Soft
power’ was thus a deliberate attempt to halt the declinist narrative and
convince Americans of their essential pre-eminence in world politics. If it
is true that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”73 then
soft power belongs to the drive towards maximising state power and
justifying its ever increasing encroachment on private life in the name of
the public (or even, in its more hubristic excesses, the universal) good.
With regard to its incoherence, as Janice Bially Mattern argues, Nye

theorises ‘soft power’ (1) as a “natural objective experience” based on “the
allegedly universally attractive values of cosmopolitanism, democracy,
and peace”; and, (2) as “a social construct”, emphasising the importance
Leadership," Timesonline.co.uk,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5510049.ece. Accessed:
17/08/2009.; Leonard Doyle, "Clinton Leads Bid to Restore Us 'Soft Power'," Independent.ie,
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/clinton-leads-bid-to-restore-us-soft-power-1559991.html.
Accessed: 17/08/2009.
66
e.g.: Paul Harris, "Hawks Depart as Clinton Ushers in New Era of Us 'Soft Power',"
Guardian.co.uk, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/11/obama-white-house-clinton.
Accessed: 17/08/2009.; S. Nossel, "Smart Power," Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004).; "Smart Power
Initiative," Center for International and Strategic Studies, http://csis.org/program/smart-power-
initiative. Accessed: 17/08/2009.
67
e.g.: J. B. Mattern, "Why 'Soft Power' Isn't So Soft: Representational Force and the
Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics," Millennium-Journal of International
Studies 33, no. 3 (2005).; Y. W. Wang, "Public Diplomacy and the Rise of Chinese Soft Power,"
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008).; Joshua Kurlantzick,
Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007).; E. J. Wilson, "Hard Power, Soft Power, Smart Power," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008).
68
Fitzpatrick, "The Future of U.S. Public Diplomacy: An Uncertain Fate."
69
Anthony Pratkanis, "Public Diplomacy in International Conflicts: A Social Influence Analysis,"
in Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, ed. Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor (Oxford:
Routledge, 2008), p.111.
70
Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic
Books, 1990), p.ix.
71
Ibid., p.188.
72
Ibid., p.259.
73
Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations
Theory," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), p.207.
p.14.
“of public diplomacy for” attracting foreigners “to ones’ own values.”
These “two ontological statuses [of] attraction”74 are mutually exclusive.
‘Soft power’ thereby naturalises a contradictory hegemonic universalism
and what Mattern calls “representational force”;75 which “promotes a
‘power politics of identity’ in which domination is played out through the
representations that narrate ‘reality’.”76
Two ‘Schools’
Snow, following Signitzer & Coombs, identifies two ‘schools’ of thought
on public diplomacy:
1) The ‘tender-minded school’ aims to “foster mutual understanding
between” U.S. citizens “and the people of other countries around
the world.”77
2) The ‘tough-minded school’ seeks to maximise state power using
whatever tools of influence are the most effective.
This schoolification is not always clear cut, however a distinction is
discernable.
For the ‘tough-minded’, public diplomacy is a branch of ‘smart power’78

(the dialectical synthesis of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power) – one element of the
‘full-spectrum’79 apparatus of state:
[A]chieving and sustaining smart power is not just a nice thing to
do. It has become an urgent matter of national security, and it
needs to be done well and done now.80
For the likes of Richard Armitage81:
We don’t engage in soft power or smart power because we’re
humanitarian, but because of cold calculation of our national
security.82
74
Mattern, "Why 'Soft Power' Isn't So Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic
Construction of Attraction in World Politics," p.591.
75
Ibid.: p.586.
76
Ibid.: p.611.
77
Snow, "Rethinking Public Diplomacy," p.9.
78
Nossel, "Smart Power."; Wilson, "Hard Power, Soft Power, Smart Power."; Richard L. Armitage
and Joseph S. Nye, "A Smarter, More Secure America," (Washington D.C.: CSIS Commission on
Smart Power, 2007).
79
Defined by the U.S. Department of Defence report ‘Joint Vision 2020’ as “the ability of US
forces, operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency partners, to
defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations.”: "Joint
Vision 2020," (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 2000).
80
Wilson, "Hard Power, Soft Power, Smart Power," p.120.
81
(Former Deputy Secretary of State): "The Honorable Richard L. Armitage,"
Armitageinternational.com,
http://www.armitageinternational.com/team/print.php?print=true&id=1. Accessed: 05/09/2009.
p.15.
Nevertheless, the ‘softer’ aspects of public diplomacy remain important for

Armitage because of the power they are perceived to bring83: the U.S. must
not confuse “public diplomacy with loud speech,”84 he continues. For
Nye, the benefit of ‘soft power’ (which, for Nye means both public
diplomacy and bi/multi-lateral diplomacy85) is simply that:
When you can get others to want what you want, you do not have
to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your
direction.86
However, even this supposedly cold, ‘hard’, rational (masculine) foreign
policy choice lacks the clarity it supposes. As Nye writes at another
juncture:
[T]he beauty of information as a power resource is that, while it
can enhance the effectiveness of raw military power, it ineluctably
democratizes societies.87
The ‘information power’ of public diplomacy therefore exceeds mere
military might, suggesting a more ethically efficacious outcome, going
beyond calculated self-interest.
For the ‘tender-minded’ Manuel Castells, public diplomacy is a social

device for intercultural communication and a more kindly, collaborative,
democratic sort of statecraft:
The [purpose of] public diplomacy is not to assert the power of a
state … in the form of “soft power.” It is, instead, to harness the
dialogue between different social collectives and their cultures in
the hope of sharing meaning and understanding[, … aiming] not to
convince but to communicate, not to declare but to listen.88
The quintessentially liberal89 emphasis on ‘listening’, ‘communication’ and
operating independently of state control correlates with the rest of this
school, which is ‘critical’90 insofar as it criticises U.S. government failure to
82
Richard Armitage quoted in: Kato, "Both Japan, U.S. Must Improve Their 'Soft Power':
Experts."
83
Armitage and Nye, "A Smarter, More Secure America," p.47-52.
84
Kato, "Both Japan, U.S. Must Improve Their 'Soft Power': Experts."
85
Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs,
2004), p.31.
86
J. S. Nye, "Soft Power and American Foreign Policy," Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 2
(2004): p.256.
87
Joseph. S. Nye and W. A. Owens, "America's Information Edge," Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2
(1996): p.35.
88
M. Castells, "The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and
Global Governance," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008):
p.91.
89
Matt Armstrong, "Operationalizing Public Diplomacy," in Routledge Handbook of Public
Diplomacy, ed. Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), p.67.
90
e.g.: Nancy Snow, The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders Are Doing Wrong
and Why It's Our Duty to Dissent (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006).
p.16.
‘soften’ its power strategies, arguing that “while political power may be a
by-product of successful public diplomacy,” it is “an inappropriate
conceptual basis for the conduct of ethical and effective public diplomacy“91
(those two things being fused). Many in this school look to the Cold War
as a bygone (and golden) era when public diplomacy was taken seriously.
For Matt Armstrong, the “true roots of public diplomacy”, are gone.92
“American public diplomacy [now] wears combat boots”,93 he laments.94
For Armstrong, public diplomacy should be a “two-way street”; “more
than a tool of persuasion”; a “sociological infrastructure that helps
interpret and understand different cultures and Diasporas.”95 In other
words, in this school’s preferred vision public diplomacy exceeds (though
likely correlates with) state interests and is an instrument of peace with
civilising undertones.
Conclusions
‘Soft power’ is a flawed theory tightly and proudly bound to nation-state
interests. It is exhibitive of exactly the limitations this study seeks to
counterpose. Far from offering a potential framework for this study, it
serves as an object of critique.
The tough-minded school seeks to influence – this ‘public diplomacy’ is

therefore instrumental; representations are made on the basis of whatever
is perceived to be effective. In quintessentially American fashion, “the
truth is whatever works”.96 For this school, public diplomacy is promoted
as a useful tool of statecraft. The lines between self-interest and moralism
blur but national security is always the explicit raison d’être.
The tender-minded school seek to communicate – this ‘public diplomacy’ is

personal; representations are made on the basis of what is thought to be
proper and genuine. The truth here is the national identity. For this
school, public diplomacy is interpreted as a tool for intercultural
‘understanding’. “[W]arm and comforting in contrast to the harsh realities
of hardball diplomacy and military action”,97 it ostensibly exceeds the
91
Fitzpatrick, "The Future of U.S. Public Diplomacy: An Uncertain Fate." Emphasis added.
92
Armstrong, "Operationalizing Public Diplomacy," p.67.
93
Ibid., p.63.
94
Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has argued this point. See, for example: Robert Gates,
"Remarks by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at Kansas State University November 26, 2007,"
Thepeacealliance.org, http://www.thepeacealliance.org/content/view/524/1/. Accessed:
05/09/2009.
95
Armstrong, "Operationalizing Public Diplomacy," p.68-9.
96
John Taft, American Power: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Globalism, 1918-1988, 1st ed. (New
York: Harper & Row, 1989), p.78.; Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American
Liberalism, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).
97
Pratkanis, "Public Diplomacy in International Conflicts: A Social Influence Analysis," p.111.
p.17.
competency of the state and becomes “people-centric”98 – conducted ‘by

publics rather than at publics’.99 However, nowhere is the securitisation of
cultural difference questioned and, therefore, the active role of state actors
in this process is never scrutinised. As such, even this ‘critical’ approach
fails to comprehend its own embeddedness within state security projects.
Criticism of public diplomacy usually focuses on the ‘tough-minded’

conception, the argument usually being that it is ‘mere propaganda’.100
The suppositions of the ‘tender-minded’ school have escaped serious
scrutiny. Instead of engaging the well-worn and futile question ‘is public
diplomacy just propaganda?’, the unificatory, interpellative notion that
there is a singular truth to be represented and popularly espoused itself
deserves critique, as does the claim that such practices exceed or are
consistent with state security projects. To fulfil this ambition, this study
will have to go substantially beyond the existing boundaries of the field
both historically and theoretically.
3: What is to be done? 101
Having outlined the primary problems (both historical and theoretical), a

critical schematic can follow.
Historio-graphy
From the Certeauian perspective that historiography (history-writing)
concerns the writing of what “no longer is”,102 history can never be
written, to quote Ranke, “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“as it actually
happened”).103 Instead, the writing of history is “a return of the past in the
98
Karen P. Hughes, ""Waging Peace": A New Paradigm for Public Diplomacy," Mediterranean
Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2007): p.19.
99
Castells, "The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global
Governance," p.91.; Brian Hocking, "Rethinking the 'New' Public Diplomacy," in The New Public
Diplomacy : Soft Power in International Relations, ed. Jan Melissen (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), p.32.
100
Nancy Snow, "From Bombs and Bullets to Hearts and Minds: U.S. Public Diplomacy in an Age
of Propaganda," in War, Media, and Propaganda : A Global Perspective, ed. Yahya R.
Kamalipour and Nancy Snow (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).; Philip M. Taylor,
"Can the Information War on Terror Be Won? A Polemical Essay," Media, War & Conflict 1, no.
1 (2008).
101
Vladimir Il ich Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, New World
Paperbacks, Nw-107 (New York,: International Publishers, 1969).
102
Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2000), p.7-8.
103
Leopold von Ranke quoted in Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text : Historians and the
Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), P.9.
p.18.
present discourse.”104 The search for origin (”the point where the truth of
things corresponded to a truthful discourse”) is a search for a “place of
inevitable loss.”105 In other words: the past cannot be unproblematically made
present.
[T]o project the present on to the past … is to abuse history.106
Life, linguistic and otherwise, as it is understood today, cannot be simply
backdated. This is not, however, to subscribe to the “extreme linguistic
nominalism that asserts that we should not use words for historical
phenomena that contemporaries of the time would not have used”.107
While the lack of a common vocabulary with the past serves to highlight
its peculiar ‘absence’, this should not serve as a bar on addressing the past
with present discourse. The logical consequence of such ‘nominalism’ is
that moments of the (recent) past with which we ostensibly do share a
common lexis are present and accessible – this is closet positivism.
Simply, this goes to show that writing-the-past is a creative procedure – an
“historiographical operation”.108 A more critical study of public
diplomacy must realise this.
The Arbitrary Sign

This approach to the past hinges on one’s attitude towards the referential
or non-referential qualities of the sign. Against traditional historians who
“had customarily assumed the adequacy of reference, of words to
things”,109 this methodology involves a post-positivist theoretical
framework that rejects referential models of language in favour of a
relational model in which “there are only differences, and no positive
terms”.110 This approach emerged
when Saussure and Troubetzkoy began to locate the meaning of
verbal or phonetic language elements in terms, not of a ‘meaning’
inherent in the individual sign’s relation to its reference, but rather
in a pattern of semantic differentiation, where the meaning of a
word or sound was seen to lie, not in its identification with its real-
104
Michel de Certeau and Graham Ward, The Certeau Reader, Blackwell Readers (Oxford ;
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p.47.
105
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice : Selected Essays and Interviews
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.143.
106
James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (New York:
Blackwell, 1987), p.3.
107
Bob Scribner quoted in: Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the
English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p.2.
108
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), p.56.
109
Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.47.
110
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.,
1998), p.118.
p.19.
world reference, but rather in its being distinct from all other
words or sounds in the linguistic referential system.111
From the post-Saussurean, Derridean perspective, because meaning is no
more than an effect of “the play of signifiers”,112 it is always ‘deferred’,113
having no transcendental “centre which is itself beyond play”.114 This
disrupts the “logic of representation”115 (and thus the representational
essentialisms analysed in this essay) because no object is “simply present
in the world and then re-presented”.116 Rather, the “presence-of-the-
present is derived from repetition and not the reverse”;117 “a sign
necessarily needs to be repeatable to work as a sign”; it has no “ontological
foundation” and therefore
the effect of ontology - the “presence-of-the-present” - comes to
depend on this very repeatability.118
In other words, all objects and subjects achieve ‘presence’ (are ‘real-ised’)
through the repetitive play of difference, not any a priori facticity.
Representations are thus historically contingent. They may be destabilised
by examining the margins of the discourse, which are ignored or made
“abject”119 because they reveal the “constitutive outside[s]”120 of the
discourse, which must remain externalised in order to sustain inner
coherence.
Genealogy
This theoretical and critical ambition coheres with a genealogical historical
methodology which “does not pretend to go back in time to restore an
unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten
things”. The aim of such an approach is to “search for descent”; to disturb
“what was previously considered immobile;” to fragment “what was
111
Raymond; Leerssen Corbey, Joep, Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and
Scholarship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), p.x. Original emphasis.
112
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p.385.
113
Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology, Corrected ed. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p.xliii.
114
Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard, "Discourse of Power," in The Sage Handbook of Power, ed.
Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard (London: SAGE, 2009), p.115.
115
Claire Colebrook, "From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist
Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens," Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): p.81.
116
Simone Drichel, "Of Political Bottom Lines and Last Ethical Frontiers: The Politics and Ethics
Of "The Other"," Borderlands 6, no. 2 (2007).
117
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p.52.
118
Drichel, "Of Political Bottom Lines and Last Ethical Frontiers: The Politics and Ethics Of "The
Other"."
119
Julia Kristeva, "Approaching Abjection," in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed.
Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003).
120
Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge,
1992), p.379.
p.20.
thought unified;” to show “the heterogeneity of what was imagined

consistent with itself.”121 By following the Nietzschean maxim “only
something which has no history can be defined”,122 fissures and vistas can
be opened within the existing discourse that makes space for inventive
conceptualisations. For public diplomacy, this means going outside of the
conventional historical limitations and searching the family-tree for
precursors (or ‘forebears’) to the concept in order to ascertain its
“conditions of understanding”.123
Following James Der Derian’s On Diplomacy, the ambition of this study is,
therefore, to “disabuse the history of [public] diplomacy” by looking
“backward to discover whether there are symptoms of [public]
diplomacy’s crisis inherent yet hidden in the present depictions of its
essential beginning and nearly seamless history”.124 A full account of
descent exceeds the possibilities of this essay, however a partial account
will yield significant results. The period and place chosen for this
excursion is seventeenth-century England, a period of enormous upheaval,
well outside the comfort zone of existing public diplomacy studies and
therefore ripe for a genealogical analysis. Although the revolutions of this
century are perhaps overshadowed by those of the next, they were
nevertheless formative years in the (hi)story of modernity. If public
diplomacy and the ‘narrative of misrepresentation’ are modern
phenomena then their roots in this time should be both apparent and
revealing.
4: Genealogy
The analysis here considers four genealogical forebears to ‘public
diplomacy’:
1) Representation: Insofar as public diplomacy is a representative
activity it is discursively indebted to this development. The
analysis focuses particularly on Hobbes’s “theory of attributed
action”.125
2) Diplomacy: While diplomacy-proper only came into common usage
after the seventeenth-century, its development practically and
121
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice : Selected Essays and Interviews, p.146-7.
122
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Carol Diethe, On the Genealogy of
Morality, Rev. student ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.53.
123
Certeau, The Writing of History, p.35.
124
Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, p.3.
125
Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," Journal of Political
Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): p.27.
p.21.
etymologically at this time is significant and it is the most obvious

semantic precursor to public diplomacy. Unlike the other sections,
this does not concentrate exclusively on English developments but
considers the development of diplomacy in the same period
Europe-wide (because, by modern definition, diplomacy is an
international system).
3) Public/s: Often ignored when considering the etymology of public
diplomacy, the concepts ‘public’/’the public’ underwent significant
change in this period.
4) Propaganda: Arguably the closest practical relation to public
diplomacy, the word came into common usage at the start of the
seventeenth-century and the practice is closely related to the
technological and political developments of the time.
Each concept is:
a) Examined etymologically, setting the context for the analysis;
b) Examined in terms of its semantic and practical development in the
seventeenth-century;
c) Summarised in terms of its role in the ‘conditions of emergence’ of
public diplomacy.
Representation
Etymology
The concept of representation “emerged only in the early modern
period”.126 The shift towards it was gradual, with some crediting its
initiation to Plato.127 The graduality of the process is demonstrated by the
recognition that, despite the Platonic roots of the concept and although
they engaged in activities “which we might say involve representation”
(i.e. electing officials, sending ambassadors), the Ancient Greeks had no
equivalent word. For them, the world was lived as it was ‘in itself’ rather
than what it ‘stood for’: “not as raw matter to be quantified, known and
measured, and not as data to be represented.”128 This goes to show that
genealogy is not etymology; however, it is a good place to start.
‘Representation’ derives from the Roman word representare meaning “the

literal bringing into presence of something previously absent”.129 “From
126
Hanna F. Pitkin, "Representation and Democracy: Uneasy Alliance," Scandinavian Political
Studies 27, no. 3 (2004): p.337.; ———, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967), p.2.
127
Jacques Derrida, "Sending - on Representation," Social Research 49, no. 2 (1982).; Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
128
Claire Colebrook, "Questioning Representation," Sub-Stance, no. 92 (2000): p.52.; see also
Derrida’s reading of Heidegger: Derrida, "Sending - on Representation."
129
Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p.2-3.
p.22.
about the fourth century,” representare and its associated terms began to
refer, within the Christian church, “to the act of speaking or acting in the
name of someone else, and more specifically to doing so with permission
or authority”.130 By the early Middle Ages, “the term repraesentare had
come into standard use”.131
17th Century
By the 1620s ‘representation’ had broadened from its “original
applications in art, religion and the theatre” and came “to refer to any
substituted presence”.132 Furthermore, it become associated with popular
representation and linked “with the idea of self-government.”133 In the
1640s, parliamentarians wrote of the representativeness of Parliament in
the sense “that it constitutes a recognisable image or likeness of the
populace as a whole.” For them, “the two Houses may be said to offer a
‘representation’ – a picture or portrait – of the body of the people.”134
Though politicised, the aesthetic connotations of the word thus remained.
By 1641, the Commons was referred to as “the Representative Body of the
whole Kingdom”.135 The change in usage was explicitly political, serving
as an authority claim by the Commons against both the King and the
Lords.136
The claim of Parliament to represent all the people had long been
used as a weapon to challenge the king; in the Civil War it
[became] a justification for overthrowing him.137
In 1651, “in the midst of this etymological development”,138 Thomas

Hobbes published Leviathan, wherein he formulated the most influential
theory of representation of the time. Hanna Pitkin has argued that it was
“the first examination of the idea of representation in political theory”;139
however, Quentin Skinner has shown that Hobbes presented “a critical
commentary on a range of existing theories, especially those put forward
by the parliamentarian opponents of the Stuart monarchy at the beginning
of the English civil wars.”140 “[A]t the heart of” this critique of the
130
Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2
(2005): p.161.
131
Ibid.: p.162.
132
Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p.247-8.
133
Ibid., p.3.
134
Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," p.163.
135
"House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 03 December 1641," Journal of the House of
Commons: volume 2: 16401643 (1802), http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=600.
136
Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p.249.
137
Ibid., p.252.
138
Ibid., p.250.
139
Hanna F. Pitkin, "Representation," in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence
Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.140.
140
Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," p.155. Emphasis added.
p.23.
parliamentarian (and, for that matter, the mainstream royalist) arguments

lay the “theory of attributed action”141 – Hobbes’s theory of representation.
This theory developed representation into a form more comparable with
that of today and, significantly, linked it explicitly to authority and
sovereignty. Taking a closer look at this theory, therefore, will highlight
the development of the term in the time period in question.
Hobbes began his analysis by noting that the word persona, which was
originally a piece of theatrical terminology142 signifying “the disguise, or
outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage”, had come to
mean “any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as
theatres”.143 Drawing on this association of ‘artifice’ with creativity,
performance and theatre (while the modern association of artifice with
falsehood became evident in the 1650s144, Hobbes’s use of the word is
without this connotation) Hobbes specifies two types of ‘person’ (or
persona): natural persons and feigned or artificial persons:
A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either
as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other
man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether
Truly or by Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is
he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as
representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a
Feigned or Artificiall person.145
A natural person is someone capable of self-representation. Any self-
representing, natural person can also, according to Hobbes, be an “author,
and hence … capable of authorising other persons to serve as his
representatives.”146 Self-representing, natural persons can therefore
convert themselves into artificial, represented persons so as to commission
others to act in their name. Thus, representations are born of authority (in
every sense of that word).
For Hobbes, this authority is self evident in the status of the sovereign
because the ‘person’ (or persona) of the state comes into existence when the
members of a multitude come together and commit their “conjoined
powers to a sovereign … by way of agreeing who shall be sovereign,”
which at the same time authorises “their sovereign to act in the name of
141
———, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," p.27.
142
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p.390-1.
143
Thomas Hobbes and Aloysius Martinich, Leviathan, Broadview Editions (New York:
Broadview Press, 2005), p.120. Original emphasis.
144
"'Artifice'," Online Etymology Dictionary,
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=artifice. Accessed: 01/08/2009.
145
Hobbes and Martinich, Leviathan, p.120.
146
Skinner, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," p.12-13.
p.24.
the state.”147 Once authorised (once in power) the sovereign is supreme

and can do no wrong because
he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, complaineth of
that whereof he himselfe is Author; and therefore ought not to
accuse any man but himselfe.148
Criticism of the sovereign is thus a circular argument. In the words of
Rousseau, “the sovereign, by virtue of what it is, is always [already] what
it ought to be.”149 This metaphysical incorporation is, for Hobbes, the only
means by which, “a Multitude of men,” can be “made One Person”;150 by
which a plurality of bodies can create a larger, more powerful, legitimate
Unity.
The innovation of Hobbes’s argument is twofold: Firstly, he dismisses the

parliamentarian arguments that the sovereign, because it must be
authorised by the people, is therefore subservient to them. Secondly, for
the first time the state is conceived as something separate from both the
sovereign body and the people. It is an all powerful third party risen
above all else, to which “we have no option but to permit our sovereign to
personate … if we are to have any prospect of living together in security
and peace.”151 It is:
LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) … that Mortall
God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and
defence[.]152
The genius of this creature is that it exceeds all singular corporeality,
existing above the multitude and beyond the sovereign. As Alfred Lord
Tennyson put it, “Authority forgets a dying king”.153 Though not
“Immortal”, Leviathan is closer to such than any single sovereign body; it
may, therefore, in effective perpetuity, secure the multitude from the state
of nature and the rising bourgeoisie from dispossession.154 In short, it
makes possible modernity.
147
———, Visions of Politics, p.404.
148
Thomas Hobbes and Richard Tuck, Leviathan, Rev. student ed., Cambridge Texts in the
History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.124.
149
Jean-Jacques Rousseau quoted in: Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy,
Borderlines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.104.
150
Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, p.114.
151
Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," p.179.
152
153
Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems (New York: Signet
Classic, 2003), p.280.
154
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1973), p.143.
p.25.
Figure 3 – Frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan – the Person of State.
p.26.
The Hobbesian conception of the state quickly “succeeded in establishing

itself at the heart of political discourse throughout Western Europe.”155 At
the start of the eighteenth-century, Henry St. John would write with
lament:
[T]he State is become, under ancient and known forms, a new and
undefinable monster; composed of a king without monarchical
splendour, a senate of nobles without aristocratical independency,
and a senate of commons without democratical freedom.156
“By the middle of the eighteenth century, [Hobbes’s] vision of the state
had become widely accepted in continental Europe.”157 As it became
accepted “that sovereignty is lodged not with rulers but with the state,”
the norm that “citizens owe their loyalty to the state itself”158 also came to
pass. For the later likes of Rousseau, the notion of authorised sovereign
representation was fixed firmly at the centre of the debate.159 According to
Hardt & Negri, Hobbes’s “proposition of an ultimate and absolute
sovereign ruler, a ‘God on earth,’” remains to this day foundational “in the
modern construction of a transcendent political apparatus.”160 “[A]t the
heart of” this foundation lay the “theory of attributed action”,161 and,
therefore, the concept of authorised representation.
Conclusion
Disagreement over rightful representation lay at the centre of the political
contestations of the English Civil War. For his part, Thomas Hobbes
scorned all other arguments and set in motion a “conceptual revolution”
that reverberated through “the wider political vocabularies of the western
European states”,162 making it possible to talk of sovereignty as no longer
‘owned’ by any one individual or organisation. While representation as
“the threshold of modernity”163 cannot be simply dated to 1651, Hobbes
established a theoretical form of political representation that developed
the artistic and theatrical ideas of artifice and persona and fused them with
notions of sovereignty and authority. Without Hobbes, therefore, we may
still have been able to talk of ‘representation’ but it may not have connoted
the political acts it does in the same way. Moreover, at this time the
155
Skinner, Visions of Politics, p.406.
156
Henry St. John (lord viscount Bolingbroke), The Works Of ... Henry St. John, Lord Viscount
Bolingbroke. With the Life of Lord Bolingbroke by Dr. Goldsmith, Now Enlarged (Oxford: Oxford
University, 1809), p.153.
157
Skinner, Visions of Politics, p.408.
158
Ibid., p.410.
159
Claire Colebrook, Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p.1.; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p.85.
160
Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.83.
161
Skinner, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," p.27.
162
163
Colebrook, Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze, p.1.
p.27.
concept of representation developed to such an extent that it became

possible to conceive of a nation state as distinct from its sovereign and its
people. It therefore became possible to represent a persona of the nation
that was tied to no one corporeal body but represented an abstract essence.
For the first time, therefore, it became possible to represent the ‘truth’ of a
nation in the manner to which public diplomacy is now accustomed.
Furthermore, inscribing the descent of the matter in this manner

foregrounds unmistakeably the indelible link between what could crudely
be called ‘domestic political representation’ and ‘foreign mediated
representation’. The latter, the kind of representation that American
public diplomacy claims to make (that of presenting to the foreign and
estranged a figuration of the American essence), is inexorably attached to
the domestic political representation (that has lately, with scant
justification, been fused with ‘democracy’164) that determines what the
legitimate essence to be represented is and how representations of it are to
be accredited. Foreign representation, whether by ambassador or radio
station, is thus directly linked to processes of state formation, political
legitimisation and representational authentication, the multiple forms of
which are inter-reliant.
Diplomacy
Etymology
Unlike ‘representation’, ‘diplomacy’ was not in common usage in the
seventeenth-century. The origin is usually credited to Edmund Burke who
in 1796, spoke of the ‘diplomatic body,’ and used “‘diplomacy’ to mean
skill … in the conduct of international intercourse and negotiations.”165 In
seventeenth-century Italy, diplomatic agents had become known as
“orators” and in most of Europe “ambassadors were still legati”.166 To use
‘diplomacy’ or ‘diplomat’ to refer to events of the seventeenth-century is,
therefore, an anachronism,167 however, diplomacy was not “immaculately
conceived in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or any other century”168 – there
are traces of it throughout history. The Ancient Greeks, for instance,
engaged in the sending of ambassadors and heralds; however (as with
‘representation’) they had “no single term that conveyed the themes of
diplomacy”, nor any equivalent without “supplementary political
164
“Only in the English Civil War and then in the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions did
the two concepts [representation and democracy] become linked.” Pitkin, "Representation and
Democracy: Uneasy Alliance," p.335.; see also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), p.269..
165
Ernest Mason Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 2 vols., Contributions to International
Law and Diplomacy (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), p.3.
166
Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1962), p.130.
167
Maurice Keens-Soper, "Abraham De Wicquefort and Diplomatic Theory," Diplomacy &
Statecraft 8, no. 2 (1997): p.29.
168
p.28.
associations and meanings”.169 Nevertheless, the word does have Ancient

Greek roots.
The diplo- in ‘diplo-macy’ derives from “the ancient Greek verb diploun (to
double), and from the Greek noun diploma”170 (“diplo = folded in two +
suffix ma = object”171). ‘Diplomas’ were documents “written on parchment
and … papyrus”, “handed over to heralds [and] carried as evidence of
their status and authority.” The word diploma later “came to mean a letter
of recommendation,” a passport or “an order enabling a traveller to use
the public post.”172 As diplomas increased in quantity and importance
amidst the fractured jurisdictions of the Middle Ages, the accumulation,
organisation and authentication of these documents became an imperative
for any self-respecting polity.
[C]hanceries were set up to handle ‘diplomatic’ affairs. Indeed, in
the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, and particularly in the
Empire of the Ottos, control of the disposition of diplomas was
tantamount to control of the Empire.173
The -macy in ‘diplo-macy’ derives, according to Costas Constantinou, from

the ceremonial staff or mace carried by the heralds and messengers of the
Carolingian dynasty (751–987). These items, which were of symbolic
rather than defensive utility,174 authorised “the agent as an official
medium”.175 These items were presented to messengers (known as ‘missi’)
at court ceremonies.176 Of additional etymological significance is that
‘missus’ was “the name for the royal procurator” of this period, while
‘mace’ also denoted “the scepter of sovereignty”.177
17th Century
“During the seventeenth century”, ‘diploma’ became associated with
‘diplomatica’, a change that “appears to have started with the charging of …
Daniel Van Papenbroeck, with the examination of ancient monastic
diplomas in order to determine their authenticity”, the falsity of which
“had been suspected since medieval times.”178 Papenbroeck “claimed that
almost all Merovingian diplomas and other medieval documents were
169
Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, p.78.
170
Ibid., p.77.
171
José Calvet de Magalhães, The Pure Concept of Diplomacy, Contributions in Political Science,
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p.58.
172
173
174
Iver B. Neumann, "The English School on Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled,"
International Relations 17, no. 3 (2003): p.358.
175
176
Neumann, "The English School on Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled," p.358.
177
178
Ibid., p.78-79.
p.29.
forgeries”.179 Devastating as these claims were to the archival wealth of his

order180 (not to mention the reputation and integrity of the entire system of
political communication of the time), the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon
“worked silently for six years” to refute Papenbroeck’s criticisms. He
studied “the form, not the content, of old diplomas”181 and his forceful
critique compelled even Papenbroeck to accept his methods and
conclusions.182 Mabillion’s masterwork ‘De re diplomatica’, first published
in 1681,183 established a new science called ‘diplomatic’ or ‘diplomatics’,
which Mabillon defined as:
[C]ertain and accurate terms and rules by which authentic
instruments can be distinguished from spurious, and certain and
genuine ones from uncertain and suspect ones.184
His techniques and his definition remain in use to this day.185
In 1693, Gottfried Leibniz published Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus,186 a

collection “of treaties and other official documents”187 which attributed “to
the adjective diplomatic the meaning of something related to international
relations.”188 Such activities were institutionalised across Europe: shortly
after his appointment as English historiographer royal in 1693, Thomas
Rymer was directed to compile and “publish all records of alliances and
other transactions in which England was concerned with foreign powers
179
Ibid., p.79.; "'Diplomatic'," 1911encyclopedia.org,
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Diplomatic. Accessed: 05/08/2009.
180
181
Ibid.
182
"'Diplomatic'." ; ———, On the Way to Diplomacy, p.79.
183
Jean Mabillon, De Re Diplomatica Libri Vi. In Quibus Quidquid Ad Veterum Instrumentorum
Antiquitatem, Materiam, Scriptuam, & Stilum; Quidquid Ad Sigilla, Monogrammata,
Subscriptiones, Acnotas Chronologicas; Quidquid Inde Ad Antiquariam, Historicam,
Forensemque Disciplinam Pertinet, Explicatur & Illustratur. Accedvnt Commentarius De Antiquis
Regum Francorum Palatiis. Veterum Scripturarum Varia Specimina, Asseruntar & Illustrantur
(Luteciae Parisiorum,: sumtibus viduæ L. Billaine, 1681).
184
Quoted in: Heather MacNeil, Trusting Records: Legal, Historical, and Diplomatic
Perspectives, The Archivist's Library V. 1 (Boston, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000),
p.20.
185
Ibid., p.86.
186
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus, in Quo Tabulæ Authenticæ
Actorum Publicorum, Tractatuum, Aliarumque Rerum Majoris Momenti Per Europam Gestarum,
Pleræqve Ineditæ Vel Selectæ, Ipso Verborum Tenore Expressæ Ac Temporum Serie Digestæ,
Continentur (Hannoveræ,1693).
187
Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, p.3.
188
Magalhães, The Pure Concept of Diplomacy, p.58.
p.30.
from 1101 to the time of publication”.189 This became the Foedera

(“treaties”).190
As Nicolson notes, it was through these works of accumulation and

authentication “that the usages of diplomacy as a science based upon
precedent and experience came to be established”.191 The association of
‘diplomatic’ with the study of archives rather than inter-sovereign
representation persisted until relatively recently.192 Not until Burke’s
accreditation with the origin of the term after 1796 did the meaning shift
decisively. However, by the late seventeenth century, the “link of the
diplomatic with diplomas and handwriting was increasingly
overshadowed by the newly established political theme”193 as attention
was gradually diverted “away from the form or style of the diploma-
document,”194 towards “what it actually represented in international
relations.”195 The meaning of ‘diplomacy’ crossed over from the
‘diplomatic’ verification of documents to the ‘diplomatic’ system of
negotiation and communication.
So goes the story of the word, but what of the practice?

Many aspects of the diplomatic organisation of western and central
Europe as it existed by the beginning of the Seventeenth century
continued with little essential change down to the French
Revolution and indeed beyond.196
Change was slow, however diplomacy gradually became more
institutionalised in the late seventeenth-century.197 According to
Mattingly, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, foreign
affairs remained in a state of confusion due to the nepotism of feudalism,
the multiple actors assigned to each task and the multiple tasks assigned
to each actor.198 “Everywhere outside of Italy political relationships …
were still personal” and diplomatic organisation, just like the rest of
189
"'Thomas Rymer'," 1911encyclopedia.org, http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Thomas_Rymer.
Accessed: 07/08/2009.
190
Thomas Rymer et al., Foedera, Conventiones, Literæ Et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica,
Inter Reges Angliæ Et Alios Quosvis Imperatores, Reges, Pontifices, Principes, Vel Communitates,
Ab Ineunte Sæculo Duodecimo, Ed. 3. ed. (Hagæ Comitis,: apud Joannem Neaulme, 1739).
191
Harold Nicolson, Diplomacy (London: T. Butterworth ltd., 1939), p.26-27.
192
Ibid.
193
194
M. Konrad, "International Biodiplomacy and Global Ethical Forms: Relations of Critique
between Public Anthropology and Science in Society," Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 2
(2007): p.332.
195
Alexander Ostrower, Language, Law, and Diplomacy; a Study of Linguistic Diversity in
Official International Relations and International Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1965), p.109.; Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, p.80-81.
196
M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450-1919 (London: Longman, 1993), p.41.
197
Ibid.
198
Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p.224-29.
p.31.
government “was, in 1600 as in 1500, still just the king’s household and his
retinue.”199 France under Richelieu was foremost among the reformers. In
1626, Richelieu amalgamated the organisation of foreign relations “within
the Ministry of External Affairs, over which he himself maintained
constant supervision. He thereby secured that the word of command in
foreign affairs should be delivered by a single voice only”.200 By the end of
the century, diplomatic representation had lost “any overtones of
religiosity”201 and become the prerogative of the sovereign alone.202 In this
way, the development of diplomacy matches that of political
representation as over the century the “undergrowth of quasi-
diplomacy”203 was cast aside as absolutism centralised political authority
within each distinct territory. It is unlikely to be coincidental that “from
the advent of Richelieu to power in 1616 until the Revolution more than a
hundred and sixty years later, the diplomatic method of France became
the model for all of Europe”.204
For an ambassador in the seventeenth-century, “the safeguarding … of the

honour and standing of the monarch” continued to be “the most
fundamental of his duties”.205 For Mattingly, such duties were
characterised by “pointless squabbling”, perceived insults and dangerous
symbolic manoeuvres from which physical violence, even war, followed.206
However, as Der Derian notes:
[I]t is as much the “petty” rituals and ceremonies of power as it is
the “great” events of power politics or the famous developments
of international law which define diplomacy[.]207
Particularly as we are interested in the representative function of
ambassadors, the ceremonial aspect of their act is of the utmost
significance. The seventeenth-century witnessed an increase in the
importance, complexity and (most importantly) the sense of
representativeness of ceremony. In Italy “symbolic courtesies” and
“emphasis on the representative character of the ambassador’s office”208
had been of the utmost importance since the 1470s, though it was ahead of
its time. By the early 1600s in the rest of Europe
199
Ibid., p.224.
200
Harold Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (London: Constable, 1954), p.53.
201
Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p.216.
202
Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450-1919, p.42.
203
Ibid.
204
Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, p.62.
205
206
Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p.252-53.
207
208
p.32.
ambassadors began to behave as if injury to their master’s subjects

was an insult to his crown, and to intervene to protect their fellow-
countrymen without waiting for specific instructions to do so.209
The role of the ambassador became such that “in the gesture of obedience
or condolence or congratulation which the ambassador performed, he
acted as if in the person of his prince.”210 Ambassadors, therefore, became
less authorised communicators and more authorised representatives (as
we would understand such today).
The reasons for this change are too complex to go into, however it is
undisputed that, to a large extent, the “emergence of Western diplomacy
was driven by the disastrous desolation caused by the Thirty Years’
War“.211 The drive to end this war (or, more accurately, these wars) led to
the development of large scale conference diplomacy. “The first of these
congresses were the linked meetings held at Münster and Osnabrück
(1643-8) which resulted in the Peace of Westphalia.”212 Although they
were novel in format, norms of the time prevailed in the details as, despite
their close proximity, the delegations negotiated mostly through
correspondence.213 The mode of communication thus remained largely
textual, paralleling the continued importance of diplomas at this time,
although increased physical proximity gradually reduced this
dependence.
Conclusion
Three principle practical developments have been outlined:
1) Gradual bureaucratisation and centralisation;
2) Increasing ‘representativeness’ of ambassadors in ceremonial and
administrative functions;
3) Development of conference diplomacy.
These are complimented by the etymological development of ‘diplo-
macy’, both halves of which are related to the authorisation of political
communication and the symbolic establishment of sovereign right. The
word evolved from its roots in the collection and collation of treaties (e.g.
Leibniz, Rymer) and the authentication of such documents (e.g. Mabillon)
to the actual engagement with representation and negotiation.
It took the developments of early modernity to make the diplomat

‘representative’ as we understand that term now. While ambassadors had,
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid.
211
John D. Stempel, "Covert Action and Diplomacy," International Journal of Intelligence and
CounterIntelligence 20, no. 1 (2007): p.122.
212
David H. Dunn, Diplomacy at the Highest Level: The Evolution of International Summitry,
Studies in Diplomacy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p.26.
213
Ibid.
p.33.
in a sense, always embodied the messages of their employers, during this

period they began to act on the sovereign’s behalf and eventually would
act on the nation-state’s behalf as sovereignty was alienated from the
sovereign body. Although, diplomacy in the seventeenth century “was
still far from modern”,214 there was a shift in the kind of representation
practiced – from carrying the voice of another human to ventriloquising215
that which has none, a defining feature of both public diplomacy and
modernity in general.
Public/s
Etymology
The term public had many different senses in early usage[.]216
‘Public’ comes from the early Latin poplicus (“from the feminine poplus,
later the masculine populus, ‘people’”), which led to publicus, “under the
influence of pubes, in the sense of ‘adult men,’ ‘male population’.”217
‘Public’ emerged into English from Old French around the middle of the
fifteenth century and by 1542 is observed to have meant “open to all in the
community”. The noun meaning “the community” is first found between
1611218 and 1612.219 The sense of being devoted “to the promotion of the
public welfare” or being “public spirited” is found from 1607.220
‘Public’, therefore, historically connoted adulthood and masculinity. Its

precursors often referred to common access, as in a “public place.”221
According to Habermas, the res publica was any property generally open to
the population.222 “In medieval writings, lordly and public” were used
interchangeably223 and the public was associated with power but it did not
carry the explicit associations with political office found later.224 The
‘private’, which ‘public’ eventually came to be defined in opposition to,
214
215
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, Studies in Continental
Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.87.
216
Vincent Price, Public Opinion, Communication Concepts, (Newbury Park: Sage Publications,
1992), p.7. Original emphasis.
217
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), p.2-3.
218
"'Public'," Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=public.
Accessed: 26/08/2009.
219
Patricia Ann Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996), p.46.
220
Ibid.
221
Price, Public Opinion, p.7.
222
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p.4, 112-14.
223
Price, Public Opinion, p.7.
224
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p.5.
p.34.
came from the Latin privatus, the “past participle of privare” meaning “to
bereave, deprive, dispossess, rob”. This corresponded in later usage to
mean a “person who does not hold public office or have rank (1432)” or a
“group of persons apart from the general community (1526)”.225
17th Century
Like ‘representation’ and unlike ‘diplomacy’, the word ‘public’ was in
common usage in the seventeenth-century, although opinion is divided on
the extent to which one can draw equivalence between current meanings
and those of the period.226 In accordance with its Latin roots, in the
seventeenth-century the public was associated with the masculine: Just as
today, while a “public man” acted “in and for the universal good”, a
‘public woman’, was “a prostitute, a commoner, a common woman. A
public action”, therefore, could only be “authored from or authorized by
the masculine position.”227 The parliamentarian Henry Parker’s 1643
pamphlet “The Oath of Pacification…”, in ‘proposing a solution’ for the
“‘almost ship-wrackt’ English state”, referred to excluding from his
“publike Counsaile”:
[A]ll that are not of the Protestant Religion, of the British Nation,
of the Masculine Sex, all that not generally reputed virtuous, and
sworne to be faithfull servants to the State as well as to the
Court.228
In the constitution of public office, for Parker, the unwanted Other(s) must
be excluded. The “constitutive outside”229 of publicity was drawn
nationally, sexually and religiously. It is clear, though not entirely explicit,
also that the public was the realm of the good – the private was that of the
irrational and dangerous. Indeed, ‘private’ at this time generally “denoted
a passive or subordinate position” removed from the public “sphere of
office”.230 A private person, therefore, could be a subordinate person in
what we would now commonly call public office. ‘Private’ was a
gendered term and related to suggestions of privacy (and subordination)
residing within the feminine domestic realm. Privacy, furthermore,
suggested “what was hidden beyond public scrutiny, [or] what was
secret”.231 “For Henry Parker, the private was virtually synonymous with
225
Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life, p.43.
226
Mark Gould, Revolution in the Development of Capitalism: The Coming of the English
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).; T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and
Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: University Press, 1950).
227
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, p.3.
228
Henry Parker, "The Oath of Pacification, or, a Forme of Religious Accommodation Humbly
Proposed Both to King and Parliament: Thereby, to Set an End to the Present Miseries and Broyles
of This Discomposed, Almost Ship-Wrackt State," in Bristol University Arts & Social Sciences
Library - Restricted Pamphlet DA412 1643 PAR (London: Robert Bostock, 1643), p.5.
229
Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, p.379.
230
Conal Condren, "Public, Private and the Idea of the 'Public Sphere' in Early-Modern England,"
Intellectual History Review 19, no. 1 (2009): p.22.
231
Ibid.: p.23.
p.35.
the factional or the conspiratorial threat to the public.” This distrust went
both ways as “Charles I would make the same sort of accusation, with
men such as Parker in mind.”232
‘Public opinion’, prior to the English Revolution, was considered to be

thoroughly illegitimate. Only inside parliament, where “a customary right
of free speech in the 15th century had evolved into a formal privilege under
the Tudors”,233 could speech be a legitimate public matter. As Habermas
puts it, “public opinion can by definition only come into existence when a
reasoning public is presupposed”234 and in the seventeenth-century, the
people were thought to be “fickle, unstable and incapable of rational
thought” – they were a “many-headed monster” to be tamed and
trained.235 For Sir John Denham in a poem published in 1642:
feign’d devotion bends
The highest Things, to serve the lowest Ends:
For if the many-headed Beast hath broke,
Or shaken from his Neck the Royal Yoke,
…
Then Power’s first Pedigree from Force derives,
And calls to mind the old Prerogatives
Of free-born Man;236
For the likes of Denham, government itself was “a consequence of the
Fall” to be conducted by the privileged few; “democracy, by handing
power to the sinful majority, would defeat the objects of government”.237
Thomas Smith argued that common people “have no voice or authority in
our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be
ruled.”238 Charles I published explanations of his decisions to dissolve
Parliament in 1625 and 1626 but was “careful to explain that he was not
bound to give an account of his ‘Regall Actions’ to anyone except God”.239
Even Gerrard Winstanley, member of the ‘True Levellers’, compared the
232
Ibid.: p.25.
233
D. Zaret, "Petitions and the ''Invention'' of Public Opinion in the English Revolution," American
Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (1996): p.1508.
234
Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia
Article (1964)," New German Critique, no. 3 (1974): p.50.
235
Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, Rev. ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p.181.
236
John Denham, Poems and Translations, with the Sophy, 6 ed. (London: Printed For Jacob
Tonson, 1719), p.179.
237
Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, p.181.
238
Thomas Smith quoted in: David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and
the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.53.
239
J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London ; New York:
Longman, 1986), p.34.
p.36.
“giddy-headed multitude” to “clouds without rain, carried about by the

doctrine and dream of new lights beginning to appear”.240
For Hobbes, privacy was dangerous, even blasphemous – duels were

“‘private revenges’, exemplifying disobedience to the sovereign.”241 It was
the sovereign that Hobbes described as “the Publique Person” who is
“Representative of all his own Subjects”.242 As such, all subjects held “a
private relationship with the sovereign’s ruling office.” The whole state
thus became “the private sphere, made so only by there being a properly
obeyed locus of absolute sovereignty, the public representative in
office.”243 From seventeenth-century onwards, the “state monopolized the
right to declare itself as the primary ‘public’ arena through its claim to
successfully represent and defend the general interests of those it
governed.”244 It offered the “first freedom” of “security-from-violence”, by
removing subjects from the state of nature. Hobbes’s legacy is that,
henceforth, “the protection and fostering of life have been understood as
the liberal solution to the problem of persuading individuals to submit to
the Leviathan.”245 By the people sacrificing liberty and submitting “to the
sovereign’s process of power accumulation,”246 the state allowed for the
pursuit of ‘private’ interests in a manner compatible with the ‘public’
good.247
By the start of the eighteenth-century, Henry St. John was able to

distinguish “private security” from “publick tranquillity” in describing the
“ends of good government”.248 “[P]ublick” was associated with “duties”
and “private” with “studies”.249 Most importantly, he would further
distinguish between “publick revenue” and “private property”,250 while
criticising those who would “make a private court at the publick
expense”.251 This was a case of actions taking place in the improper
domain, rather than one domain having necessary authority over another,
a marked contrast to previous associations. Nevertheless, the public as a
realm remained that of the political.
240
Gerrard Winstanley quoted in: Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England,
p.289.
241
Condren, "Public, Private and the Idea of the 'Public Sphere' in Early-Modern England," p.23.
242
243
244
Patricia Owens, "Distinctions, Distinctions: 'Public' and 'Private' Force?," International Affairs
84, no. 5 (2008): p.980.
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid.; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
247
Owens, "Distinctions, Distinctions: 'Public' and 'Private' Force?," p.981.
248
St. John (lord viscount Bolingbroke), The Works Of ... Henry St. John, Lord Viscount
Bolingbroke. With the Life of Lord Bolingbroke by Dr. Goldsmith, Now Enlarged, p.302.
249
Ibid., p.201.
250
Ibid., p.120.
251
Ibid., p.253.
p.37.
Conclusion
In the seventeenth-century, as we have seen, publicity was expressly
associated with power and authority – it was not yet explicitly opposed to
the state in the manner in which it is now understood but indications of
movement in this direction are recognisable. Privacy was associated with
femininity and subordination, while public action was associated with
political office and characterised by a masculinist ethos.252 While elements
of public discourse proliferated throughout this era
there was no distinctive, let alone legitimate, private sphere that
circumscribed and delineated the public, let alone a sphere
populated, of all things, by morally autonomous individuals.253
Thus, Habermas’s communicative ideal “where legitimation is achieved
through the unimpeded communication of participants”254 and thus
constitutes a ‘public sphere’ cannot be said to be present at this time.
Whether a ‘public sphere’ had or had not emerged at this time (if that is
even a useful analytical concept), the role of the ‘public’ had evolved
alongside the nascent modern state. Public opinion was still loathed and
derided by the ruling classes, but its importance was increasingly
recognised. To the extent that public diplomacy is diplomacy at, by or for
publics, therefore, its conditions of possibility began to emerge at this time.
Propaganda
Etymology
‘Propaganda’ descends from the Latin propago, or propagare, a composite of
pro meaning ‘forth’ and the root pag “meaning to set, to fasten down”.255
As a noun, a propago is “a layer or shoot; and the shorter forms of pango
and pago suggest fastenings.”256
The OED dates the use of the word ‘propagation’ to 1588, …
‘propagating’ to John Pory in 1600, and the verb ‘to propagate’,
including beliefs and doctrine, to 1570.257
The word therefore has deep roots and carries connotations of growing,
spreading and disseminating but also of fixing, securing and fastening.
While in early modern Britain there was no directly equivalent word to
‘propaganda’, The Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (the Holy
Congregation for Propagating the Faith) was founded by the Roman
252
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, p.3.
253
254
Colebrook, Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze, p.12.
255
Stanley B. Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
2002), p.15-16.
256
Ibid., p.16.
257
Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, p.2.
p.38.
Catholic Church in 1622, to promote counter-reformation doctrine.258 It

was established “to harmonize the content and teaching of faith in its
missions and consolidate its power”259, particularly in the New World.260
17th Century
[T]he English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was
accompanied by a concomitant media revolution.261
From methods of production and distribution to the techniques of their
formulation and the licensing system “by which the services of writers
were employed, and the manner in which their projects were scrutinised,
assisted and supervised”, the seventeenth-century “witnessed the growing
sophistication of print propaganda, indeed its complete transformation,
particularly after the execution of Charles I in 1649.”262
Although it was invented two centuries before,263 the printing press, in its
latest guises, “enabled people to involve themselves in politics to an
unprecedented degree” throughout the seventeenth-century.264 “From the
Reformation and the Dutch Revolt onwards, printing” was used as a
medium of revolution that “demanded the twin response of counter-
propaganda and censorship from the authorities.”265 This censorship was
only “erratically effective”266 and during the ‘first’ English Civil War (1642-
46), “the breakdown of the censorship and licensing system established by
the Tudors and Stuarts led to a massive flow of news-sheet
propaganda.”267 It took Cromwell’s draconian Printing Act of September
1649 to tame sedition and strangle the opposition press.268 Therefore,
although the ‘print revolution’ opened up new possibilities for education
of and subversion by those outside the immediate ruling classes (although,
of course, restrained by limited literacy and economic inequalities), “it also
provided new possibilities for the manipulation and control of public
258
Joad Raymond, News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (London:
Routledge, 2006), p.2.
259
Jay Black, "Semantics and Ethics of Propaganda," Journal of Mass Media Ethics 16, no. 2 & 3
(2001): p.121-22.
260
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),
p.146.
261
Jeremy D. Popkin, Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives (Lexington, Ky.:
University Press of Kentucky, 1995), p.48.
262
Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, p.305-06.
263
John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed
the World (London: Review, 2002).
264
Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to
the Present Era, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003), p.117.
265
Ibid.
266
267
Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p.118.
268
Raymond, News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe, p.85.
p.39.
opinion.”269 Seventeenth-century politicians came to understand “the

developing importance of public opinion,” and were aware of the growing
interest of the public in contemporary political events. They recognised
propaganda “as being vital in order to explain policies, and to generate
and sustain support.”270 “From the late 1630s, the press was exploited to
an unprecedented degree, in order to mobilise public opinion, and to
justify political actions.”271
During the early seventeenth-century, “the manufacture and

dissemination of royal propaganda in pamphlet form was becoming a
routine government function.”272 According to Harold Nicolson, Richelieu
“was the first to introduce a system of domestic propaganda”, overseeing
the circulation of pamphlets “designed to create a body of informed
opinion favourable to his policies”. Published from 1605,273 the Mercure
François was later used by Richelieu “as a means [of] directing and
correcting public opinion”.274 As with the reform of the organisation of
diplomacy, Richelieu was heavily involved in the organisation of French
propaganda, contending, despite the “undisputed autocracy” of the time,
“that no policy could succeed unless it had national opinion behind it.”275
Propaganda by the mid-seventeenth-century became “increasingly

bureaucratised, centralised and professionalised”, while there developed
“new kinds of relationship between propagandists and politicians.”276
Early in the century, the actions of pamphleteers “reflected a desire to
serve the interests of their friends and patrons; to display their personal
support for religious and political causes; and to place their services at the
disposal of political grandees.”277 Over the period, however, the
relationship between authors and politicians moved “away from
aristocratic networks towards professionalisation and the emergence of a
civil service.”278 The period witnessed the “decline of propaganda and
polemic” dedicated to “personal loyalty to patrons”. Instead
propagandists became motivated “by the prospect of financial
remuneration.” They were integrated “into political life and into
269
270
Ibid., p.303.
271
Ibid.
272
Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public
Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
p.25.
273
"'Mercure François'," primary-sources.eui.eu, http://primary-sources.eui.eu/website/mercure-
fran%C3%A7ois. Accessed: 10/08/2009.
274
Michel de Certeau, "History Is Never Sure," Social Semiotics 6, no. 1 (1996): p.15.
275
Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, p.51.
276
277
Ibid., p.303.
278
Ibid., p.27.
p.40.
bureaucratic administrations,” and the range of duties performed

exceeded simple distribution, ranging from “intelligence gathering to the
logistical management of propaganda, and from the composition of official
statements to subtle polemic”. It was this new institutional basis that
“formed key elements of the machinery of propaganda.”279 In exploiting
“the means of legitimation”,280
propaganda became centred on the early modern government,
wherein the resources of the executive and its bureaucracy were
brought to bear on the world of publishing. As such, it reflects
directly upon the formation of the state in seventeenth-century
England.281
Conclusion
The “first high-profile, popular use of the term propaganda”, as we have
seen, comes from “the foundation of the Congregation dedicated to
doctrinal uniformity within the Roman Catholic Church’s worldwide
religious community.”282 The theme of bureaucratisation and the changing
shape of state power in the period, as seen with representation and
diplomacy, characterised the emergence of mass propaganda in Europe.
Its role in state-formation indicates that, despite the non-emergence of a
clear cut ‘public sphere’, and although it was largely a conceptual
impossibility before 1651, ‘public opinion’ did “become a fact of political
life” by the later seventeenth-century. Princes and bureaucrats were thus
compelled “to control and manipulate this public opinion” and therefore
developed “early forms of propaganda”.283
5: Conclusion
While the above analysis has barely scratched the surface of the genealogy
of public diplomacy, it has yielded a great deal of interest – an excess,
indeed. Three particularly rich veins stand out: states, public/s, authors.
Each will be analysed in turn before drawing an overall conclusion.
States
The main theme running across all four strands of the above analysis of is
that of state formation. The gradual bureaucratisation of the seventeenth-
century facilitated an increasingly centralised form of state power. For his
part, Hobbes’s “Artificiall” person, based on his theory of representation,
279
Ibid., p.306.
280
Ibid., p.307.
281
Ibid., p.306.
282
Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction, p.15.
283
Ibid., p.17.
p.41.
allowed for the conceptual creation of an ‘artificial’ state. When this

insight is combined with the Derridean deconstruction of the “logic of
representation”284 we can say that the American state is an imaginary
entity that exists only insofar as it is re-presented repetitiously and in
distinction to all other signifiers in the language system. The American
state, like all others, therefore requires repetitious re-presentation to ‘exist’,
both within and outside of its territorial borders.
Within an advanced liberal democracy such as the U.S., this representation

far exceeds the point of saturation whereby the entity becomes reified and
very difficult to ‘think without’. The extent of its extra-territorial
representation is considerable (more so than any other state) but
significantly less than within its borders, lacking as it does the endlessly
imbricated, totally permeated character of the intra-state experience.
Moreover, the means by which the state is represented often projects an
image that is less than desirable to the U.S.’s super-saturated citizens. For
most non-U.S. citizens, America will become ‘real-ised’ through popular
culture, businesses or the military. As Armstrong notes:
Ironically, Americans as a whole are less in touch with their
military, while those beyond our borders, especially in today’s
contested regions, experience America first-hand through our
military.285
It is hardly surprising then that the U.S. appears so aggressively
militarised to much of the world’s population compared to how benign
and beatific it often seems to its own. Armstrong continues:
Failing to manage perceptions amplifies the mismatch between
words and deeds, images and perceptions, allowing the enemy to
own the narrative.286
The problem for Armstrong is that the U.S. is misrepresented by its
extraterritorial representations when improperly managed (when public
diplomacy fails to represent the authentic identity). However, if the state
cannot be unproblematically made present – if its ‘presence’ results from
repetitious ‘play’ rather than the inverse – then how is this sovereign
identity constructed? For Hobbes it is by ‘artifice’. For the structuring
arguments of the public diplomacy agenda, there seems to be no
equivalent reply.
For Armstrong, among others, of course, it is not so much the state as the
American public that is to be represented. How then is this entity to be
constructed?
284
Colebrook, "From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy
of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens," p.81.
285
Armstrong, "Operationalizing Public Diplomacy," p.64.
286
Ibid.
p.42.
Public/s
As was briefly noted above, Hobbes’s usage of the words ‘fiction’ and
‘artificiality’ did not carry the connotations of falsity that they do today. In
light of this, the following can be considered a particularly ‘forgetful’
notion:
A nation’s public diplomacy can reveal the best and contextualise
the worst, but it cannot present a fiction.287
Not only are publics, like states, fictions but they are indispensable in the
discursive construction of the liberal state. As Michael Warner argues:
It’s difficult to imagine the modern world without the ability to
attribute agency to publics, although doing so is an extraordinary
fiction.288
The genealogy has shown us that the discursive conditions of possibility of

publics are affected not just by the technological possibilities of mass
media or even the presence of res publica, but also attitudes towards
gender, rationality, religion and, above all, power. In this period, privacy
denoted unpredictability, submissiveness and femininity. By the end of
the century, the shift towards more a familiar publicity, connoting
association with public office but carrying more spatial and conceptual
associations was noticeable. This is extremely important for the
development of the legitimacy of the modern democratic state. To quote
Warner again:
If it were not possible to think of the public as organized
independently of the state or other frameworks, the public could
not be sovereign with respect to the state.289
For Hobbes, without a sovereign “Publique Person”290 “to represent it and
play its part in the world”,291 the state cannot exist. In modern
democracies such as the U.S., “the public is sovereign” and popular
representations, public diplomatic and otherwise, serve “to re-present
collectively held-norms back to the public, and convince the public that its
views coincide with that of the sponsor.”292 In other words, a “reasoning
public” must be “presupposed”293 in order to sustain a liberal democratic
state; however that public must, in turn, be simultaneously convinced of
(a) its distance from the state; and, (b) the mutuality of its interests with
287
Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, p.503.
288
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p.123.
289
———, "Publics and Counterpublics," Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): p.51. Emphasis added.
290
291
292
Daniel Lessard Levin, Representing Popular Sovereignty: The Constitution in American
Political Culture, Suny Series, American Constitutionalism (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1999), p.66. Emphasis added.
293
Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)," p.50.
p.43.
the state. To sustain all these conditions, the state is dependent upon the
creation of a recognisable, empirically measurable public that legitimates
legislative action by having an identifiable corporate identity. Within this
system, ‘opinion’ is assumed to be “propositionally summarized … held,
transferred, [and] restated indefinitely.”294 As such, the “public is thought
to exist empirically and to require persuasion rather than poesis”295 – such an
attitude is mistaken. As Derrida puts it:
[P]ublic opinion … does not speak in the first person, it is neither
subject nor object …; one cites it, one makes it speak,
ventriloquizes it[.]296
This ideological requirement is utterly manifest in public diplomacy
discourse, especially in the ‘tender-minded’ school wherein public
diplomacy is to some degree separable from state action. To sustain this
discourse, the poetic preconditions of publics are necessarily suppressed –
publics are assumed to have an objective existence. Far from facilitating
the operation of extra-statal power, therefore:
The projection of a public is a new, creative, and distinctively
modern mode of [state] power.297
This is the power to constitute an ‘other’ of the state – a “constitutive
outside”298 from which the state can be taken to be delimited, made
identifiable, ‘real’ and finite in its pretensions to power.
However, defining the public as an entity separate from the state itself
(which exists in public but is not the public) obscures the distinction
between public and private. As Giorgio Agamben argues,
we frequently can no longer differentiate between what is private
and what [is] public[. … B]oth sides of the classical opposition
appear to be losing their reality.299
In the seventeenth-century the distinction was clear and the associations of
publicity with politics and privacy with domesticity were evident though
in flux. Today, public diplomacy exhibits the breakdown of that
distinction. As Cull argues:
Public Diplomacy Is Everyone’s Business[.] … The behavior of
one American – whether a tourist, businessman, or service person
… plays a part in U.S. public diplomacy.300
294
Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," p.83.
295
Ibid.: p.82. Emphasis added.
296
Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, p.87.
297
Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," p.77.
298
Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, p.379.
299
Giorgio Agamben and Ulrich Raulff, " Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, a Work of Art
without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life,"
German Law Journal 5, no. 5 (2004): p.612.
p.44.
The ostensive progressiveness of conducting foreign policy by, for and

through publics is revealed when one problematises the distinction
between these ‘realms’, as one must upon revealing their historical
contingencies.
For public diplomacy the populace is conceived as a resource to be tapped

into. Judith McHale (current Under Secretary of State for Public
Diplomacy and Public Affairs), for example, argues:
[O]ur greatest asset of all … [is] the American people.301
One might commonly reject such sentimentality as ‘mere’ rhetoric,
however, in this context, it appears to be more significant than that.
Former British diplomat Shaun Riordan, suggests groups that could be
utilised for the furthering of public diplomacy plans, including:
“universities and individual academics”; “schools and colleges”; “NGOs,
national and international”; “journalists”; “political parties”; “citizen
groups, ranging from babysitting collectives to local issue lobbies and
parent-teacher associations”; “business associations and individual
companies”; “youth movements”; “sports clubs”; “chat rooms and
usernets.”302 For Condoleezza Rice:
Public diplomacy is no longer the job of our experts alone; … we
are mobilizing … the American people to help.303
On these accounts, anything even vaguely ‘public’ can be appropriated as
a political resource. Although many of the above are all at least tacitly
public organisations, their privacy is also plain. In public diplomacy,
‘publicity’ becomes all encompassing in the name of the ‘public’ good –
privacy is erased under the cover of ‘engagement’ and ‘understanding’.
‘Publicity’ thus engages in a peculiarly dualistic operation in ‘public’

diplomacy: first, ‘publics’ are assumed to be verifiably isolatable entities
existing in opposition to states, legitimating their ‘other’ and capable of
quantification; second, ‘public’ in opposition to ‘private’ also denotes the
realm of the good, the engagement of civic responsibility for the benefit of
the collective – both these situations compliment state imperatives. Upon
close inspection, publics are fictions – they are ‘ventriloquized’ objects of
discourse, as is shown by their absence in the seventeenth-century under
300
Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, p.502-03.
301
Judith McHale, "Public Diplomacy: Renewing America’s Engagement with the People of the
World," U.S. Department of State, http://blogs.state.gov/index.php?/mobile/display/1181.
Accessed: 20/08/2009.
302
Shaun Riordan, "Dialogue-Based Public Diplomacy: A New Foreign Policy Paradigm?," in The
New Public Diplomacy : Soft Power in International Relations, ed. Jan Melissen (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.191.
303
Condoleezza Rice quoted in: Richard Nelson and Foad Izadi, "Ethics and Social Issues in
Public Diplomacy," in Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, ed. Nancy Snow and Philip M.
Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.340.
p.45.
different political (not just technological) conditions. ‘Public’ diplomacy

serves a minor poetic function by allowing the state actors to conceive of
the population even in their relative privacy as resources to be ‘mobilized’.
If publics lack objective existence, then public diplomacy allows the
governmentalised formulation of a public that exists so as to serve the
collective good – it allows a topographical, ‘bird’s-eye-view’ of a
population’s ‘cultural resources’. Again, such occurs with reference to a
unified, common (but still un-authenticated) good.
Whether re-presenting states or publics, therefore, the question for public

diplomacy remains the same. How is the unified object to be re-presented to be
legitimated – that is to say, authorised?
Authors
Diplo-macy, as we have seen, has, far back into its prehistory, been
associated with and dependent upon processes of
authorisation/authentication. In the Hobbesian theory, an action
performed by a representative “can be validly attributed to” an author “if
and only if the representative has in some way been duly authorised”.304
A problem for Hobbes’s argument is how to distinguish representation
from mis-representation.
What enables a sovereign claim, when he or she performs an act of
sovereign power, that such an act can properly and validly be
attributed to the person of the state?305
Although the state may have “actions ‘truly’ attributed to it”, being
‘artificial’, “the state cannot give authority to anyone to represent it, and
cannot therefore authorise its own representation.”306 Hobbes’s solution to
this problem is arguing that we, as subjects “covenant in such a way as to
authorise some designated man or assembly to represent us, thereby
granting them the right and authority to speak and act in our name.”307
The sovereign (be it a king or a parliament), therefore “cannot fail to act in
the best interests of the people … [because it] simply is the people re-
presented ‘to the life’.”308 This does not, however, let us understand how
extra-territorial representations can be made; how do those who are not
subjects realise what is the legitimate, authorised representation?
Constantinou describes the process of diplomatic representation thus:

I decide to send an embassy. … I name my ambassador, the carrier
of my logos. I authorize him to speak in my name. … He reaches
304
305
306
———, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," p.22.
307
———, "Hobbes on Representation," p.167.
308
Ibid.: p.164.
p.46.
the destination. He gets accredited. He gives the message. His logos

now represents me.309
This description demonstrates how the process of authorisation occurs at
two points: departure and reception; sender and receiver. Hobbes’s
account of authorisation cannot account for the legitimation of extra-
territorial, trans-sovereign representation. Diplomatic representation
might be technically authorised by ‘diplomatic’ (the authentication of
handwriting), as long as the receiving party accepts the sovereignty of the
sending, however public diplomacy has no diploma in its asymmetrical
operation; it can rely on neither the Hobbesian incorporation process (as it
is foreign publics), nor the Mabillonian authentication process (as it is
foreign publics). It seems, therefore, that public diplomatic representation
can be neither authorised nor authenticated. Perhaps for Hobbes this
failure would be irrelevant – for public diplomacy advocates obsessed
with the authentic nothing could be more relevant.
In Leviathan, a person travelling to another state without direct

authorisation from the sovereign cannot be considered that state’s ‘public
representative’:
[I]f a man be sent into another Country, secretly to explore their
counsels, and strength; though both the Authority, and the
Businesse be Publique; … he is but a Private Minister; but yet a
Minister of the Common-wealth; and may be compared to an Eye
in the Body naturall.310
There is a distinction made here between public as a kind of action and the
public body (the sovereign) – public circulation does not mean public
authority – attribution comes not from production but from authorisation.
In such a public/private (rather than public/public) role, one is not
entirely divorced from the state but nor does one carry the sovereign
essence. The metaphor of the “Eye” suggests a useful functionality, but
nothing as highly empowered as state representation. Such a person
might be a spy, a lobbyist or a propagandist.
Many public diplomacy advocates have gone to great lengths to either: (a)
deny the strength of public diplomacy’s affiliation with propaganda; or,
(b) deny the indignity of the comparison. As an example of the first
manoeuvre, Melissen argues:
The distinction between propaganda and public diplomacy lies in
the pattern of communication. Modern public diplomacy is a
‘two-way street’ … [it] listens to what people have to say.311
309
Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, p.31. Emphasis added.
310
311
Jan Melissen, "The New Public Diplomacy: Between Theory and Practice," in The New Public
Diplomacy : Soft Power in International Relations, ed. Jan Melissen (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), p.18.
p.47.
Public diplomacy is thus distinguished by its apparent openness and

mutuality. As an example of the second manoeuvre, Philip Taylor argues:
[W]e need peace propagandists, not war propagandists – people
whose job it is to increase communication, understanding and
dialogue between different peoples with different beliefs.312
Propaganda is thus ‘reclaimed’ as something approximating (‘tender-
minded’) ‘public diplomacy’. This, in combination with Hobbes’s last
point above, allows us to understand that propaganda is that which public
diplomacy is trying to escape from, not only because of the word’s
nefarious implications, but because propaganda is unrepresentative,
illegitimate and therefore subversive of the very narrative that public
diplomacy advocates wish to reinforce – the ‘narrative of
misrepresentation’. Yet it is propaganda that coheres most with ‘public
diplomacy’ in practice, insofar as (unlike diplomacy) it is technically and
symbolically asymmetrical. To return to ‘schoolification’: while the
‘tough-minded’ simply seek influence without representation, the ‘tender-
minded’ seek active engagement and thus legitimated representation. On
the face of it this latter approach seems kinder and more democratic; upon
this analysis, it simply seems more problematic.
Given that public diplomatic representations can be authenticated in

neither the Hobbesian nor Mabillonian sense, how can they possibly be
authorised? Accepting the Hobbesian metaphysics that “there are few
things incapable of being persons”313 – that anything capable of being
represented can have actions attributed to it “whether Truly or by
Fiction”314 – then an abstract, American essence of the sort public
diplomacy appeals to can ‘exist’ through repetitious citation, however, as
with all kinds of representation, there must still be a discursive mechanism
to limit interpretational possibility to prevent inevitable semantic
dispersion – some sort of process of authentication.
One might say that this question is that of the ‘author’. For Foucault this
entity is a relatively recent phenomenon: “Texts, books, and discourses”,
he argues, only “began to have authors” once “authors became subject to
punishment” and “discourses could become transgressive.”315 The author
is thus a political construction that coincides with the growth of
disciplinary power. It is
312
Philip Taylor quoted in: Snow, "From Bombs and Bullets to Hearts and Minds: U.S. Public
Diplomacy in an Age of Propaganda," p.23.
313
Thomas Hobbes quoted in: Skinner, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,"
p.17.
314
Hobbes and Martinich, Leviathan, p.120.
315
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.108.
p.48.
a certain functional principle by which … one impedes the free

circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,
decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.316
The author, therefore, “does not precede the works”;317 it is not a person,
nor even a persona – it is a function of discourse. This more abstract author
helps us understand how public diplomatic representations might become
authorised.
In the discursive milieu of the English Civil War, Hobbes wrote to support
his chosen representation/representative; he helped perform the “author
function”318 (enclosing and delimiting the range of possible
interpretations) for his preferred representational interpretation. For
Hobbes the one, true sovereign was the king; for U.S. public diplomacy
advocates it is the ‘essence’ of American life. Both attempt to set and settle
in their writings, with varying degrees of success, the received facticity of
the nation. As people argue over the proper, ‘ethical’ form that public
diplomacy should take they are engaging in the process of authorisation
(albeit as a minor part of a diffuse assemblage of debaters) of the image to
be represented. If the nation has no a priori essence to be
unproblematically presented (and, as Hobbes showed us, it cannot) then
the truth is whatever is circulated. The argument over public diplomacy’s
proper conceptualisation is, therefore, a contest of discursive power
seeking to fix a certain interpretation of state power as the authentic one.
Public diplomacy is an attempt at maintaining ‘functional-authorisation’; it
is entirely dependent upon Leviathan (as a unifying force), but Leviathan
is dependent upon its ‘functional authors’ (to police the boundaries of its
discourse). To claim ‘truth’ to any discourse (as is the raison d’être of
public diplomacy) one must engage both these beasts (Leviathan and the
functional-author/s). Public diplomacy advocates are but one tiny corner
of this discursive contestation, but that does not change the purpose of
their efforts.
Three methods of authorisation have thus been outlined. The first

Hobbesian method cannot work outside sovereign borders; the second
Mabollonian method relies upon communicative symmetry; the third
relies the contestation of discursive circulation and is ultimately at the
mercy of prevailing trends. A fourth option is suggested by Hobbes’s
other, less feared beast, his history of the English Revolution Behemoth,
wherein he asks:
[H]ow came the people to be so corrupted? And what kind of
people were they that could so seduce them?
316
Ibid., p.119.
317
Ibid.
318
Ibid.
p.49.
Among the blameful for the Revolution were Presbyterians, Papists and
“advocates of liberty of religion”, among others. Hobbes perceived a
wide-ranging “lack of understanding of the nature of authority and
obedience.”319 Particularly reproached were the universities, which had
produced “even greater evils than these supine but loyal and
(presumably) well-meaning clergy.”320 They were the “core of the
rebellion” and while they should not be “cast away” they must be
“disciplined”.321 Obedience comes not from “natural wit”, argues Hobbes,
rather “it is a science, and built upon sure and clear principles, and to be
learned by deep and careful study, or from masters that have deeply
studied it.”322 The universities should be purged of dangerous influences
and an agenda of discipline and obedience taught to cease the ferment and
secure a legitimate and productive literati for the state’s benefit.323 In
short, Hobbes self-consciously and self-righteously laid claim to the
foundation of modern political science. In a rather Foucualdian turn, it
was to rationally evaluate the proper disciplinary mechanisms necessary
for an obedient citizenry.
In reference to Foucault and Deleuze, Hardt & Negri contrast two kinds of
society. The ‘disciplinary society’ is
that society in which social command is constructed through a
diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and
regulate customs, habits, and productive practices.324
This is the society suggested in Hobbes’s plans for academic discipline, the
goal of which was to strictly and, if necessary, violently limit intellectual
activity so as to foster a productive (bourgeois), obedient (absolutist)
society. By contrast, the ‘society of control’ is
that society … in which mechanisms of command become ever
more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field,
distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens.325
This is the society suggested in the discourse of public diplomacy, which is
born of a collectivity of academics, politicians and practitioners coming
together to construct an idea of a more peaceful form of statecraft under
the rubric of public diplomacy. It is self-motivated (in all senses of that
phrase) and it is heart-felt. It is a product of the highly developed liberal
319
Royce MacGillivray, "Thomas Hobbes's History of the English Civil War: A Study of
Behemoth," Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 2 (1970): p.187.
320
Ibid.: p.192.
321
Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil War (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1964), p.74.
322
Ibid., p.200.
323
MacGillivray, "Thomas Hobbes's History of the English Civil War: A Study of Behemoth,"
p.193.
324
Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.23.
325
Ibid.
p.50.
state – a state whose citizens fight for the legitimacy of their ‘own’
interpretations. This is the realisation of what, in Aihwa Ong’s words,
could be called the citizenary obligation “to be both self-managing and
patriotic.”326
In addition to the three above outlined authorisation mechanisms,

therefore, we can add two more: the construction of a society to either (a)
restrict and discipline; or, (b) re-purpose and control, both thereby
orienting the citizenry towards ends productive of the state discourse.
Neither can ultimately, finally fix the semantic slippage of the state ideal –
as with all projects of securitisation, nothing is ever final – however, these
are powerful discursive functions and they are exhibited strongly in public
diplomatic discourse.
Summation
Like the Cheshire cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the interest
in the subject … lies in its very insubstantiality.327
To state the case with the greatest possible simplicity: public diplomacy is
inextricably bound to the modern nation-state both in terms of its current
understandings and its entire intellectual lineage (at least as far back as the
seventeenth-century). The same is true of the (partially coterminous) re-
presentational agenda ‘embodied’ by Barack Obama. Both presume an
approved, authorised national essence. The difference between these two
things is the manner in which they expect authorisation. While Barack
Obama is the incorporate, symbolic representative of the ‘American
public’, as ‘artificial’ as that may be, public diplomacy expects to re-
present an abstract national essence besides this. The way this
performance is proposed is the enlisting of any and all possible parts of the
population to serve the re-presentational agenda – this tells us a great deal
about the modern liberal state.
Public diplomacy clearly fails in its attempts to re-present whatever object

it is supposed to perform (state/public/nation). It cannot possibly
succeed, nor do its cheerleaders often claim in significantly self-certain
terms that it can – every eager analysis is capped by a less than confident
caveat. It is the attempt to re-present that raises interest. Public diplomacy
is interesting in its insubstantiality. Its speaking from the margins marks
its very intrigue. Why do those involved evangelise so? And why do
those in power pay periodic lip-service to it, even if such is fleeting? Why
does a marginal discourse not simply suffocate and disappear altogether?
326
A. Ong, "Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology," Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 32, no. 1 (2007): p.6.
327
J. M. Lee, "British Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War: 1946–61," Diplomacy & Statecraft 9,
no. 1 (1998): p.112.
p.51.
Figure 4 – Ronald Reagan, Voice of America.
Although its roots are plainly widespread, public diplomacy remains an

American invention. It speaks of the need, not just to dominate, but to be
loved – it is a desire for hegemony, domestic and international. It says
much of the overwhelming popular desire to exist in a collectivity (a
nation state) but also to have that glorified conglomeration be an object of
beauty for the whole world to see (and the whole world must see it). It
shows just how instruments of statecraft, while differing in their function
internally and externally, have a strong performative function on both
sides. Public diplomacy sits at the edge of foreign policy discourse,
reminding subjects of their beneficence. Spoken from the margins, it
(partially) establishes and delimits the centre of the discourse – the
fulcrum and zenith of the American representational ideal. In making
peace-like representations abroad, Americans make up the peace-like
character of the American self-image. Moreover, the discourses in and
around public diplomacy and the ‘narrative of misrepresentation’ are
immanent to the structure of domination inherent in the society of control.
This is demonstrated by the swathes of civil society eager to rush to the aid
of ‘public diplomacy’. By such communal, interpellative activities, the
thunderous roar of a spectre most vile and violent – the blood-thirsty
Leviathan – is silenced from the collective’s own shores via the attempt to
quieten it on that of Others.
p.52.
As mentioned above, Hobbes’s conceptualisation of the state has

dominated Eurocentric political discourse since its inception. As
Mattingly gloomily concludes in his masterful account of Renaissance
Diplomacy:
The community of Europe, from the early seventeenth century for
more than three hundred years, was to be composed not of
individuals, not of estates and cities and provinces, but of these
voracious, amoral, man-made monsters, the Leviathans.328
“The real problem” for all those following this emergence “was the one
which mocked Job: by a slender line of logic to draw up Leviathan with a
fishhook.”329 In Mattingly’s view, Grotius’s efforts in international law
were valuable because:
In a world in which the Leviathans were loose, clearly the terms of
persuasion had to be altered.330
Then, as now, this seems true. This essay has basically been premised
upon a ‘what if?’ argument: what if ‘difference’ is not the problem it is
made out to be? This is not to doubt that cultural difference is a political
problem,331 nor that it is a potential cause of violence. (Indeed, it is
accepted that, in Derridean terms, ‘difference’ is productive of all
meaning, identity and possibility for violence.) Nor is this an attempt to
deny that communication is preferable to violence in political life. What
this essay has tried to show is that the reductive blaming of violence upon
difference is part of a ‘narrative of misrepresentation’, which resurrected
public diplomacy and is revealed in its theoretical incoherence as
significantly less benign than it pretends to be – upon inspecting its
genealogy, its founding myths unravel.
As Jodi Dean puts it most succinctly:

[A]ll this tolerance and attunement to difference and emphasis on
hearing another’s pain prevents politicization. Matters … are
simply treated … as specific issues to be addressed therapeutically,
juridically, spectacularly or disciplinarily rather than being treated
as elements of larger signifying chains or political formations.332
The politicisation of the securitisation of difference is urgently necessary –
the politicisation of difference itself has already happened. The quasi-
328
329
Ibid.
330
Ibid., p.295.
331
e.g.: Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference.; Richard
Shapcott, Justice, Community, and Dialogue in International Relations, Cambridge Studies in
International Relations 78 (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
332
Jodi Dean, "Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics," Cultural
Politics: an International Journal 1 (2005): p.56.
p.53.
criticism of public diplomacy literature is simply inadequate to this task.

This essay has shown that what needs to be considered when thinking
about difference from a standpoint embedded within state security
projects is that this Leviathan demanding re-presentation may not be, as
Hobbes had it, “that Mortall God, to which wee owe … our peace and
defence”;333 but rather, as it was for Nietzsche, “the coldest of all cold
monsters”, which does its subjects nothing but harm when “this lie
creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” It is a lie!”334
333
334
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dover Thrift
Editions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), p.30.
p.54.
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U.S.

Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama:

From the premises: (a) Barack Obama has promised representational

comfort zones by setting it in the context of the political contestations of

Trauma and Response

This tall tale emerged from a traumatic ‘event’8 – a ‘surprise’ – that, in

Inevitably, the Other was the first to be (un)ceremoniously sacrificed.

It has been claimed that:

To simplify the debate, two overlapping and interdependent ideal typical

America’s mis/representation around the world became a serious political

This assertion is consistent with much public diplomacy discourse in that

Figure 1 – Barack Obama, Cairo University, 4 June 2009.

In January 2009, Anne-Marie Slaughter27 wrote that:

visited Turkey.33 Moreover, his inauguration speech was full of talk of

Nancy Snow36 summed up the sentiment of many liberal Americans when

American public diplomacy”,41 he nevertheless fully ascribed to the

The problem of difference within state security projects is thus a matter of

For fear of false-starting, however, all of this begs a question of

2: What is Public Diplomacy?

Figure 2 – Willis Conover and Louis Armstrong, Voice of America, 1955.

5) ‘International broadcasting’: operation of state-run media

“Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy”.51 The phrase gradually

This pre-history is not contended but its significance is unrecognised. It

A famous diplomatic aphorism has it that:

civil66 and academic67 discourse and has to a significant extent become

With regard to its incoherence, as Janice Bially Mattern argues, Nye

For the ‘tough-minded’, public diplomacy is a branch of ‘smart power’78

Nevertheless, the ‘softer’ aspects of public diplomacy remain important for

For the ‘tender-minded’ Manuel Castells, public diplomacy is a social

The tough-minded school seeks to influence – this ‘public diplomacy’ is

The tender-minded school seek to communicate – this ‘public diplomacy’ is

competency of the state and becomes “people-centric”98 – conducted ‘by

Criticism of public diplomacy usually focuses on the ‘tough-minded’

3: What is to be done? 101

Having outlined the primary problems (both historical and theoretical), a

The Arbitrary Sign

thought unified;” to show “the heterogeneity of what was imagined

etymologically at this time is significant and it is the most obvious

‘Representation’ derives from the Roman word representare meaning “the

In 1651, “in the midst of this etymological development”,138 Thomas

parliamentarian (and, for that matter, the mainstream royalist) arguments

the state.”147 Once authorised (once in power) the sovereign is supreme

The innovation of Hobbes’s argument is twofold: Firstly, he dismisses the

Figure 3 – Frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan – the Person of State.

The Hobbesian conception of the state quickly “succeeded in establishing

concept of representation developed to such an extent that it became

Furthermore, inscribing the descent of the matter in this manner

associations and meanings”.169 Nevertheless, the word does have Ancient

The -macy in ‘diplo-macy’ derives, according to Costas Constantinou, from

forgeries”.179 Devastating as these claims were to the archival wealth of his

In 1693, Gottfried Leibniz published Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus,186 a

from 1101 to the time of publication”.189 This became the Foedera

As Nicolson notes, it was through these works of accumulation and

So goes the story of the word, but what of the practice?

For an ambassador in the seventeenth-century, “the safeguarding … of the

ambassadors began to behave as if injury to their master’s subjects

It took the developments of early modernity to make the diplomat

in a sense, always embodied the messages of their employers, during this

‘Public’, therefore, historically connoted adulthood and masculinity. Its

‘Public opinion’, prior to the English Revolution, was considered to be

“giddy-headed multitude” to “clouds without rain, carried about by the

For Hobbes, privacy was dangerous, even blasphemous – duels were

By the start of the eighteenth-century, Henry St. John was able to

Catholic Church in 1622, to promote counter-reformation doctrine.258 It

U.S. Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama: Change or Continuity?

U.S. Public Diplomacy & Barack Obama: Change or Continuity?