Book Description

For a long time, in comparison to military and economy, the importance of arts and culture to nation-states' international standing and diplomatic relations has been underestimated. This bias comes from an insufficient understanding of arts and culture’s impacts on human behavior, nation-states, and international relations. Cultural diplomacy as one of the ways using arts and culture to shape national interests and foreign relations has long existed. In recent years, driven by the discussion of soft power, the study of cultural diplomacy has grown rapidly. However, the mechanism of cultural diplomacy serving as a part of the national strategy is unclear, which can be attributed to the asynchrony between the practice and theory development and calls for case studies with both depth and breadth to update the understanding of cultural diplomacy. The difficulties of such research lie in the enormous work and cross-disciplinary knowledge required to untangle and analyze the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of cases and distill concepts and theories from that. Targeting the gap and acknowledging the complexities, this dissertation research serves as a preliminary step in cultural diplomacy theory building to explore the mechanism of cultural diplomacy of a particular kind: the flagships. To present a well-grounded definition of flagships and generate a policy design framework for cultural diplomacy flagships, this research focuses on the practice of great powers and selects three flagships, the Fulbright Program (the U.S.), British Council (the UK), and Confucius Institute (China) for case studies and comparison. Through historical studies of individual cases and comparison of the three cases, this research explores the question of how these flagships are designed similarly or differently to address the changing international role of a country in the world. The conclusions of this research have two parts. The first part discusses the policy design of cultural diplomacy flagships from a theoretical level to generate a transferable framework. The second part of the conclusions focuses on the relationship between the cases to identify convergence and divergence as references for future cultural diplomacy research and practice.