Histories

Public diplomacy is a term much used but seldom sub-jected to rigorous analysis. This article—which draws heavily on a report commissioned by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the spring of 2007—sets out a simple taxonomy of public diplomacy’s components and their interrelationships. These compo-nents are (1) listening, (2) advocacy, (3) cultural diplo-macy, (4) exchange, and (5) international broadcasting. It examines five successful and five unsuccessful uses of each individual component drawing from the history of U.S., Franco-German, Swiss, and British diplomatic practice. The failures arise chiefly from a discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. The final section applies the author’s taxonomy to the challenges of contempo-rary public diplomacy and places special emphasis on the need to conceptualize the task of the public diplo-mat as that of the creator and disseminator of “memes” (ideas capable of being spread from one person to another across a social network) and as a creator and facilitator of networks and relationships