Influence and cultural diplomacy
Culture, an element of “wars of influence”, of “conquering minds”, K-pop versus Aya Nakamura?
Cultural diplomacy is public policy in the field of culture and foreign policy. To talk about it in the French context is to place the State at the heart of the debate. What are the challenges of international political communication, and how does France's cultural diplomacy work?
Alain Lombard describes cultural diplomacy as lying “at the intersection of cultural and international policy; it is international policy pursued in the world of culture (and culture can be both the instrument and subject of this policy)” (Lombard 2022, 3). Discussing it in the French context is to place the state at the heart of the debate.
How, then, should we think about France’s cultural diplomacy now, in the early twenty-first century? It is all about influence, which Laurent Martin has described as “the new garb of French radiance” (Martin 2023, 100). We have chosen to focus here on the recent exhortation to cultural diplomacy and its agents, both working in France and posted abroad: influence.
Two questions arise at this point. First, how do we move beyond the purely instrumental analysis of influence (not the only one available), where “exerting influence consists in getting others to voluntarily do something they would not have done of their own accord without your intervention” (Massé, Marcon, and Moinet 2006)? And, second, how do we evaluate (or measure?) these influence strategies (using what criteria, established by whom?)? Issue no. 60 of the journal Communication & Organisation, coedited in 2021 by Camille Alloing, Benoît Cordelier, and Stéphanie Yates, provides some insight into these issues.
Whether we like it or not, and whether we rejoice in the fact or bemoan it, it is obvious that culture is an element of influence that can increase or consolidate a state’s power…