Ebook: Representing Cultural Diplomacy

This study aims at understanding how representational theories can substantiate the field of Cultural Diplomacy by looking at three models: Cosmopolitan Constructivism, Nation Branding and Soft Power. The aim of the study is to provide a theoretical framework to understand, reformulate and develop the field of Cultural Diplomacy by analyzing and comparing the three main representational models. Using Hanna F. Pitkin’s discussion of political representation as a background, the author assesses the relevance of the three models in terms of the contemporary discourses of Cultural Diplomacy. These representational models address several main issues concerning how culture is represented abroad by diplomacies in terms of contents and discursivity, paying particular attention to the identity-alterity relations between the cultural-real and the represented-referent. In reference to this approach, the author presents a discussion of cultural representations and formulates an analysis of how indexical, symbolic and postmodern representations can be appropriated in Cultural Diplomacy terms. Finally, in the debate between identities and alterities, the thesis suggests that the fixed cultural representations of nations in terms of friends and competitors is continually melding with representations about enemies and exotic-others. The main theoretical contribution of the text lies in its analysis of Cosmopolitan Constructivism and its sources: multilateral diplomacy, cosmopolitan theory and constructivist politics.
In order to anchor these debates in specific realities, the author studies concrete aspects of Mexican and Swedish Cultural Diplomacies during the nineties and up to the early millennium, using them as expository cases that illustrate the theoretical apparatus. Two specific cases illustrate the political templates underlying concepts of representation: the idea of Soft-Power in Mexico through the 1990-1992 international exhibition “Mexico Splendors of Thirty Centuries” and the idea of “Nation-Branding” as set up by the Swedish Cultural Diplomatic apparatus to respond to global pressures in the early millennium. In these expository cases, the book demonstrates that Mexico and Sweden have oscillating values between a form of Cosmopolitan Constructivism and Soft Power, with an emerging Nation Branding presence in their cultural diplomacies.
This study concludes that Cultural Diplomacy is a field that, despite its minor relative impact inside the foreign ministries, can help identify the processes of constructing a cultural-national identity abroad in relation to the puzzling representations of alterity in a global world. To sum up, this thesis shows, in Cultural Diplomacy terms, the possibilities of nations being capable of telling their own stories to the world and being able, at the same time, to listen what others have to tell them about themselves.