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This introductory chapter provides a historical excursion into comparative cultural diplomacy, distinguishing Soviet approaches from the efforts to influence foreign public opinion within diplomacy and propaganda that emerged in Europe especially during World War I. It also sets Soviet cultural diplomacy in the context of the long history of foreign visitors in Russia from the Muscovite period on. Both Russian and Soviet responses to foreign travelers were historically intertwined with major cycles of openings and closings to the outside world and major shifts in European views of Russia. But the Soviet imperative of overtaking the West and combating capitalism at once fostered heightened aspirations to influence the world and intense ideological xenophobia. The Soviet approach to cultural diplomacy sharpened the geopolitical and ideological importance attached to the “West” in earlier periods, but later became far more statist, mobilizational, modern, and innovative.

This chapter examines the outposts and activities of Soviet cultural diplomacy in Western countries in the 1920s. It argues that Weimar Germany became the most important testing ground for the Soviet dilemma of choosing between ideological sympathizers and influential yet politically distant “bourgeois” partners. It provides a comparative history of the German Society of Friends of the New Russia and other cultural friendship societies created by VOKS after 1923 in Central and Western Europe and the United States. Finally, it examines the international travel of Soviet intellectuals and the role of the Soviet intelligentsia in cultural exchange, probing the patronage relations between Soviet agencies and intellectuals at home and abroad.

This chapter traces Soviet cultural diplomacy through three radically divergent periods: the mid-1930s height of the Popular Front, the Great Terror and show trials from 1936–38, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. Although the Soviet system for receiving foreigners that had emerged in the 1920s was not fundamentally reworked in the 1930s, prewar Stalinism was marked by sea-shifts in ideology and attitudes toward the outside world. The first was the rise of a “superiority complex,” in which virtually everything Soviet was deemed the best in the world, at least officially. The second was a decisive internal Soviet tilt, underway already at the height of European anti-fascism in the mid-1930s, away from the optimistic Soviet quest to engage and dominate Western cultural politics in favor of “vigilance,” ideological xenophobia, and the hunt for hidden enemies. During the Great Terror, international contacts that had previously brought prestige to Soviet cultural mediators suddenly became the grounds for mass physical annihilation as VOKS and Soviet international organizations were decimated; during the Pact period of Soviet cultural diplomacy, reduced to a shadow of its former self, became largely a matter of sending symbolic signals to the Nazis.

Avant‐garde music played a small but important role in American cultural diplomacy during the cold war. In Western Europe, it was meant to demonstrate the United States' cultural sophistication; in Eastern Europe, to present a provocative alternative to socialist realism. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the music both engaged elite listeners and elicited feelings of respectful indebtedness from broader audiences. The latter relationship can be described as an unusual form of “gift economy” in which questions of prestige and value were negotiated through the medium of a musical performance with its accompanying publicity. While during the 1960s avant‐garde jazz and art music were treated alike in some respects, American officials were more likely to alter jazz programs, reflecting ambivalent expectations about their global audiences and about jazz as high art.

This chapter locates issues of heritage and preservation in broader debates about ownership of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ property and its stewardship (or conservation) as an emerging representation of good governance. Phases of this relationship are considered at three ‘site-museums’. Initially, some in the United States saw Shakespeare's Birthplace as its own heritage and tried to acquire it. Secondly, Britain, which still spoke for Canada in matters of foreign policy, cooperated with the United States to protect monumental and scenic interest at Niagara Falls. This took place as national parks were emerging as a form of representational culture. Finally, British and American voluntarist groups come together to protect Carlyle's House, London, with government backing behind the scenes as a form of cultural diplomacy.

This chapter shows how the intense pressures of the First Five-Year Plan (also known as the Great Break or Stalin's revolution from above) profoundly affected the agendas and approaches of Soviet cultural diplomacy. The creation of Intourist, the Soviet foreign tourist agency, represented a new emphasis on promoting state interests through the acquisition of hard currency from foreign visits. In other areas, such as Soviet literature and exhibitions directed at foreign audiences, a new campaign mode emphasizing shrill propaganda and short-term political goals came to the fore. The chapter examines the influx of Western technical specialists, engineers, and workers after the onset of the Great Depression. It also highlights the limitations and misconceptions of Soviet internal analyses of the press and cultural life in Western countries during an era when access to foreign publications and information about international developments was strictly restricted.

This chapter details the correspondence between the author and the Central Intelligence Agency regarding the release of information in line with the Freedom of Information Act. At the same time the chapter builds on an emerging body of scholarship that examines the relationship between American postwar ascendancy and “cultural diplomacy” in the early years of the Cold War and decolonization. Few studies have considered how the Congress for Cultural Freedom's (CCF) underwriting reshaped and refashioned the global literary landscape, altered the relationships between writers and their publics, and rendered those whom it supported more recognizable figures than others. These practices were conceived as part of an orchestrated imperial effort to occupy a global public space that by 1948 had been largely dominated by the socialist rhetoric of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).

This chapter outlines the theoretical rationale behind the book’s argument that the Pilgrims Society’s activities during the first half of the twentieth century were a nascent form of public diplomacy and that they contributed to the development of later, more official, public diplomacy organisations like the British Council, the Division of Cultural Relations, and the United States Information Agency. In so doing, this chapter analyses the historical orthodoxies surrounding public diplomacy and offers a definition of the concept that will applied across the rest of the book. The chapter also establishes how concepts of public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, associational culture, and elite networking intersect and why this intersection is important to the Pilgrims Society.

The chapter starts from the premise that the study of cultural diplomacy, dominated by a focus on major world powers since 1945, would be illuminated by a better understanding of the cultural diplomatic activities of small, new or restored European states after 1918. It further argues that attempts to incorporate literary translation into cultural diplomacy quintessentially highlight the difficulties of practising cultural diplomacy. The chapter centrally documents the extent and nature of government support for Czech literary translation in the UK, mapping the networks that facilitated the translation of Czech imaginative literature and assessing their relationship with Czechoslovak cultural diplomacy. The chapter shows that the translation and promotion of Czech literature in the UK, though never the product of direct state strategy or intervention, is always linked to gatekeeper sympathy for the idea and aims of Czechoslovakia, but the reception of translated Czech literature in the UK shows no appreciation of this aspect until after the September 1938 Munich Agreement, when, for Czechoslovakia, it is too late.

The introduction examines Americans’ and non-Americans’ collaborative engagement with national identity through performance, which often produces different results than traditional forms of diplomacy. When San Francisco-based ODC/Dance performed in Burma through the State Department’s DanceMotion USA program, they thought the Burmese dictatorship might keep audiences away. Yet thousands dodged government-created obstacles to attend, and helped the Americans when a glitch threatened the show. Government edicts cannot completely determine how people act: that’s the lesson ODC learned and the lesson the chapter offers by focusing on cultural diplomacy from dancers’ perspectives, understanding dancers as social actors, not just government instruments. Dancers move within bureaucratic strictures, often in a contentious dance around the meaning of “politics.” Across eighty years of history, the chapter examines the private/public structures behind cultural diplomacy programs, including the State Department’s partnerships with the United States Information Agency, the American National Theatre Academy, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In 1954, the United States began using cultural tours in foreign policy to improve the world’s perception of American cultural and political life. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, cultural diplomacy became part of a broad American effort to invest the so-called “psychological dimension of power” to wage the Cold War. An important component of such an initiative was jazz diplomacy, which transformed relations between America and the Soviet Union while dramatically reshaping perceptions of the American identity worldwide. Paradoxically, jazz diplomacy also came to symbolize the cultural superiority of American democracy. This book explores how American jazz music was used as an instrument of global diplomacy and dramatically transformed superpower relations in the Cold War era by easing U.S.–Soviet political tensions in the midst of critical Cold War events such as the Little Rock crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, the dispute over the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It argues that America turned to jazz diplomacy to address the dual problems of race and culture in a global context.

This essay examines the way in which the Cold War shaped the use of sport as a tool of diplomacy in Latin America during the 1950s. It focuses on the Pan American Games in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. Cultural exchanges failed to dispel suspicion of US intervention; however, athletes shared experiences beyond diplomatic agendas. Recent research has examined how international events shaped participants’ understanding of national, racial, and gender identities. By focusing on women athletes, who historically occupied precarious positions as representatives of the nation, and examining interactions among Latin American delegations, we can understand the Pan American Games as a site of grassroots diplomacy.

The topos of inheriting the built legacy of the temples of Angkor (9^th to 13^th centuries CE) had been a vital element of the French-colonial civilizing mission in Cambodia from 1863 onwards. Yet this claim on ‘cultural heritage’ (or cultural inheritance) was subject to a novel ideological twist when Cambodia became independent in 1953. The classic ‘salvage paradigm’ once practiced by the European colonial power was now appropriated by the newly independent, quasi-‘Neo-Angkorian’ nation state (1954–1970). In this chapter, three different scenarios of this process are discussed: first, the reinvention (as continuation) of the genealogical and religious tradition of the ancient Khmer kings as central element of a new Buddhist socialism of the Non-Aligned country of Cambodia; second, the revival of the grandeur of the built Angkorian antiquity in a modern-day architectural interpretation in vast building programmes for the new-old capital of Phnom Penh and the provinces under state architect Vann Molyvann; and third, the staging of various cultural performances and re-enactments è la Angkorienne within Sihanouk’s strategies of cultural diplomacy, both inside Cambodia with sound-and-light shows inside the Archaeological Park of Angkor, and around the globe through the king’s private Royal Khmer Ballet.

This chapter seeks to strip the craft of the image of diplomacy as a ‘glamorous’ profession. The principal source base for this study is the private correspondence of c.50 diplomats and their families drawn from all ethnic groups in the British Isles. Postmodern approaches to history that inform other branches of the discipline are often greeted with a defensive hostility in international history. This study seeks rather to foster it, not through the rigorous application of theory to the interpretation of the past, but by the selective and sympathetic use of its concepts to elucidate aspects of human life and experience. This leads to the methodology employed namely the selective elucidation of diplomatic practice over time. The chapter also discusses cultural diplomacy before nongovernmental international organizations as a branch of international relations that can be defined in several ways.

This chapter traces the Latin American origins of the United States's cultural diplomacy. It begins by citing a conference held in Buenos Aires in December 1936 which epitomized America's prewar approach to foreign policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The chapter examines why America's deliberate attempt to deploy cultural affairs in pursuit of foreign policy objectives as part of its “cultural diplomacy” started in Latin America. It also considers how U.S. policymakers combined cultural diplomacy, highlighted by a series of multilateral cultural exchanges, with overseas propaganda, domestic information campaigns, and technological modernization initiatives to form the matrix of what became known as public diplomacy. Finally, it explains how the U.S. government conceived of a new kind of foreign relations that accommodated the full range of cultural and ideological forces shaping the relations between nation states.

This chapter examines the impact of World War II on U.S. cultural diplomacy in particular and foreign policy more generally. It considers the first concrete steps taken by the United States to expand its cultural programs from a series of limited, bilateral educational exchanges with various Latin American countries to a comprehensive global initiative explicitly designed to advance the overall objectives of its foreign policy. It looks at the U.S. government's adoption of a more expansive view of cultural relations which incorporated economics and politics, high and low culture, as part of an increasingly global vision. The chapter describes “cultural relations” envisioned by U.S. officials as part of efforts to shape the nation's image in the global arena during the years of the Great Debate over the future of U.S. foreign policy. Finally, it discusses the changes made in the overall structure of the U.S. Department of State to transform it into a “twentieth-century institution”.

This chapter chronicles the history of official US cultural diplomacy, starting in the 1930s up until the birth of hip hop diplomacy in 2001 and the establishment of Next Level, the first State Department–funded hip hop diplomacy program, in 2013. National security threats have long been the animating force behind US cultural diplomacy. First, the threat was fascism. Later, it was communism, and then terrorism. The first hip hop “diplomat” was rapper Toni Blackman. Next Level originated in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Mark Katz was the founding director of Next Level.

This chapter focuses on the banquet held by the New York branch of the Pilgrims Society in March 1906 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for Earl Grey, the Governor General of Canada. This dinner provides a case study of the ways in which the Society served as a network for British and American diplomats and provides one of the clearest examples of its public diplomacy activities. The banquet was held during a dispute between Britain, Canada, and the United States over fishing rights in the North Atlantic and the speeches given at the dinner by Earl Grey and Elihu Root, the US Secretary of State, were designed to mobilise public opinion in an effort to bring the dispute to an amicable end. Part of this public diplomacy effort was Earl Grey’s heavily-publicised gift to the US of a portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been in his family’s possession since the American Revolution. The rhetoric surrounding this gift provides evidence about the cultural assumptions underpinning the Pilgrims’ public and cultural diplomacy.

Whenever regular diplomatic channels were damaged or destroyed, Japanese internationalists turned toward other, seemingly non-political means for engaging with the international community. One of the most prominent of those new avenues of international cooperation entailed a shift from political activities to cultural exchange. One example can be found in the establishment and activities of the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai). Supporters of cultural exchange claimed that introducing Japanese culture to the world would contribute to mutual understanding and build respect for Japan. What the practitioners of cultural diplomacy found was that culture is never free from politics. Wartime efforts at cultural internationalism and people’s diplomacy were engulfed by imperialist policies, and the KBS was used by the government as a tool of imperialism.