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Cuisine from another country can be used as a particular brand in order to attract and create positive emotions on the audience. Through this particular emotional connection, it helps to create awareness or increase the interest of the foreign audiences. Programs such as the Diplomatic Culinary Partnership from the US, Global Kitchen or “Malaysian Kitchen to the world”, “All in good tastes: savor the flavors of Taiwan” are only a few examples of gastrodiplomacy campaigns that were launched recently. Most of those culinary nation-branding strategy are commonly launched by East and Southeast Asia countries (Rockower, 2012).
Two trends of Gastrodiplomacy may be observed along with traditional state-based diplomacy:
- Gastrodiplomacy “polylateralism” which is the interaction between states and non-state actors in the realm of public diplomacy (Wiseman, 1999).
- Gastrodiplomacy “paradiplomacy” which is sub-state actors engaging their own international diplomatic engagement (Wolff, 2007).
Gastrodiplomacy has gained importance in the literature and some authors use gastrodiplomacy and the Contact Hypothesis as a possible conflict resolution tool (Mendelson-Forman & Chapple-Sokol, 2014; Osipova, 2014). For the purpose of my thesis, I consider gastrodiplomacy as a possible subtle tool for middle powers, like Taiwan, to gain recognition and differentiate themselves from other great powers.
1.3 Methods and Cases
Measuring the efficiency of public diplomacy has been a growing concern as public diplomacy strategy acquired importance (Pahlavi, 2007). The positive impact of public diplomacy
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subjective to measure. The attractiveness of political institution, foreign policy or culture, less often lies on computable quantitative variables. Soft Power 30 published yearly brings a big contribution in measuring countries soft power resources. In the review, McClory (2015) built a framework to help to measure the efficiency of countries soft power strategy by ranking them according to both objective and subjective data. Objective data are measured through indices:
governmental efficiency, individual freedom, cultural penetration abroad, attractiveness of education in term of foreign students, universal values etc.... Subjective data are evaluated with the use of international pooling that surveyed the favorability toward a country through the perception of the foreign country, its cuisine, its luxury goods, its foreign policy, its technological product, its contribution to global affairs and the desire to visit this foreign country (McClory, 2016).
With regard to gastrodiplomacy, subjective data collected through surveys is one of the way used in order to compute the impact of this strategy, as shown by Ruddy's quantitative analysis of gastrodiplomacy (Ruddy, 2014). Policy analysis regarding budget expenditure and campaign prospect can also be used to measure the objective data and observe the impact of some of those strategies.
In this section, I explain my own framework on gastrodiplomacy measurement regarding subjective data and objective data. The purpose of this research is to find the relevance of gastrodiplomacy in the field of public diplomacy. Through the literature review, we have seen a growing interest for the subject in this field. However, I choose to go further and to see if food as a tool of public diplomacy has been used by countries in the recent years. Therefore, I will go over some major international events and statements that could relate the growing importance of food
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I would like to first confirm that gastrodiplomacy or food as a tool for reaching foreign audience matters and can be used as a strategy. I will review how food has become a tool for public diplomacy. Examples of the growing importance of food include: the acceptance of some traditional cuisine in the UNESCO lists of cultural heritage and food being the center topic of some major, global reaching, events such as the Milan Expo of 2015. In addition, with a list of the major change of focus toward gastrodiplomacy, the literature review will also support my view on the importance of food heritage and culture and its possible use as a cultural ambassador.
Therefore, my first hypothesis is:
H1: Gastrodiplomacy can be used as a useful tool to reach a foreign audience.
And the counter hypothesis is:
H0: Gastrodiplomacy is not relevant in the field of public diplomacy.
For the purpose of this thesis, I am also looking forward to analyzing the impact of gastrodiplomacy as part of the soft power resources of one middle-power. However, some problems with research design come with this research question. I choose to focus on one middle power because they tend to be less resourceful than other great powers and therefore need to be more innovative in their public diplomacy strategy. The choice of a middlepower’s soft power policy regarding gastrodiplomacy is made for practicability of the research but also because it was used as an example in Rockwell’s paper. Therefore, I choose Taiwan in order to enhance the understanding of Taiwan public diplomacy and also go further on what Rockwell has done in the field of Taiwan gastrodiplomacy. Moreover, the case of Taiwan is particularly interesting for it has many middle power competitors in the region. The examples of Korea and Japan as Taiwan gastrodiplomacy competitors are often cited.
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For the purpose of this research, I would like to analyze the public diplomacy strategy and the culinary nation branding of Taiwan. To relate it to gastrodiplomacy, I would focus on nation branding campaign related to the Taiwanese food culture and analyze their impact through survey.
Due to the relative novelty of gastrodiplomacy in the field of public diplomacy, it is troublesome to find an extensive literature or many studies on the subject and even harder to find a case study about one specific country. Moreover, as said earlier, the tools to measure the impact of public diplomacy are limited. In order to analyze Taiwan public diplomacy, I would focus on the impact of Taiwan campaign related to food in Taiwan and evaluate its efficiency through survey foreigner in Taiwan and evaluate their perception on Taiwanese food.
Two possible actors can be clearly identified for gastrodiplomacy:
• The Taiwanese government that will create cultural forum related to food to enhance its culture abroad.
• Taiwanese food or beverage companies that exported Taiwanese “traditional” food.
In order to evaluate the outcomes, I first observe if the strategy is still used after a couple of years. My expected result is that if the strategy wasn’t working, the funding for the campaign would have stopped. Moreover, in the case of exported brands related to food, such as 85C or Coco, if those companies would not break even or made a profit in the foreign county, it is expected that they leave the country where they imported their brands meaning an ineffective outreach of the foreign audience. The main Taiwanese “food” companies that I would like to use include, for example, Din Tai Fun, Chef Hung Taiwanese Beef Noodle, CoCo and some others.
My second hypothesis is that:
H2: If the gastrodiplomacy strategy is working, we can observe a continuation of this strategy by
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The counter hypothesis is:
H0: If the gastrodiplomacy strategy is not working, we can observe that the government or the companies that exported its cuisine stopped after several years.
To give the complete landscape of Taiwanese gastrodiplomacy strategy, I would also like to analyze the Taiwanese policy on Taiwan gastrodiplomacy with an in depth review and comments on its achievements and drawback. Moreover I complete the analyses with interview or feedback through email of some Taiwanese elites and Taiwanese chef on Taiwan gastrodiplomacy strategy.
The first outcome expected is that gastrodiplomacy, however not widely used internationally, has been used as an intangible public diplomacy tool. The national cuisine has been exported abroad in order to create a people-to-people bound. Interestingly, we noted that not only great gastronomic countries have used this technique such as France, Italy or Japan but also less developed “gastronomic countries” such as middle powers and this especially in Asia. The second outcome expected, through analyzes of Taiwan gastrodiplomacy is the assessment results and the possible outreach of gastrodiplomacy.